I've known for a long time it drives people nuts that job ads don't have salary, or have a wide salary range.
The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone. Until they have met them, assessed them, heard what they salary target is and weighed it up against their skills and experience and calibrated it against the team.
The conversation almost always goes like this: Employers come to me and say "we want a great senior C# .NET developer". I say "what do you want to pay?". They say "don't know, we just want someone great, what do you think we need to pay to get the right person?". I say "I think it will be about $X, but lets put a job ad up and indicate it's top of range $ and see who we get."
It is also true that a single job ad might be aiming to employ a number of people at various positions of seniority and experience.
Government agencies are required to carefully define salary ranges because that is the way they work. So it does not surprise me that governments would legislate to require job ads to do the same - essentially because of ignorance about how the world works.
If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
It's that easy - if the ad doesn't specify salary and that is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't apply.
Being angry about it or feeling that employers/recruiters are playing some sort of manipulative game is ignoring the reality set out above. And when you come into a position that requires recruiting, likely you'll speak to your recruiter and say "what do you think we'll need to pay for someone like this?".
Far more important is to know the salary target that you are aiming for.
EDIT: lots of unhappy responses to this, but don't shoot the messenger. Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works.
> don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone.
As an employee, sounds like not my fuckin problem. I'm not about to go through 3 phone screens, a take-home test, a full-day onsite, etc. just for the privilege to be low-balled or even worse denied.
> I think it will be about $X
Oh! So looks like it's not that hard to ball-park a number off the top of your head. I don't get this "how the world really works" junk. How the world "really works" right now is that job searchers are having their time wasted and don't have tools to determine what the market for various positions looks like. For work that apparently amounts to texting the on-staff recruiter I couldn't care less.
> if the ad doesn't specify salary...just don't apply.
So all job postings before these laws have been put into effect? Looks like someone doesn't understand how the world really works.
RTFA. The job range has to be "in good faith" if the job posting encompasses a range of experience levels, that's allowed. The range just has to be "in good faith". That's such a low bar to clear and from your own hypothetical the work required from the employer is basically nil.
Recruiters should be talking about numbers in the first interview. Employers should have a sense of what your number is and whether or not they can get there before moving forward with interviewing. If they're not doing that, they're wasting your time and their time.
> If they're not doing that, they're wasting your time and their time.
Actually, they're getting paid for the their time. I'm not. I'm actually burning my time.
> Recruiters should be talking about numbers in the first interview.
I'm going through the recruitment process right now and the numbers out of the gate are always lowball figures (possibly personalized to me), because of two reasons.
Because they want to see if you accept it or not. I'm sure a lot of people coming into the bay area from other cities/countries will be like "wow, 185k, that's awesome" & they'll figure it out that the company was willing to pay upto 350k for the same work.
Secondly, publicly advertising salaries have a big impact on the people who are already in the building. This is pretty much already a problem when you bring in an H1B who has to put their salary into the DoL database and post notices in the offices with their pay. But this is only base pay, not including bonuses or stocks, so it's easy to cap the base pay and fill it up with bonus packages.
So the companies are legitimately balking at this because they'll have to pay their existing employees more if they put out an attractive posting, but if they put a lowball figure nobody would even show up to interview - only people who already make lower than the lowball figure will show up & then try to negotiate upwards.
I'm currently interviewing and this is a weird dance, sort of like buying a car.
I've only got a single response to someone asking "Is this range acceptable" - "I'm looking at multiple offers and being the second best offer is no good for you and I'm not negotiating before an interview or comparing offers. It's your bid, not my ask".
I guess it's a position of privilege to deal from. My need to go to back to work isn't economic, I'll just languish if I don't find a job & become truly feral :)
> So the companies are legitimately balking at this because they'll have to pay their existing employees more if they put out an attractive posting....
Let's phrase this properly: companies are balking because they'll have to pay existing employees market rate.
Not really. Employees aren’t stupid. If they are paid below market they are a serious flight risk, especially in today’s tight labor market. We thus raise valued employee’s compensation to keep up with market.
If they're asking your number and you're not being straight forward, what's the problem?
Them: "What's your number"?
You: "$350k."
Them: "Ok, cool lets move forward." or "That's a lot of money and we can't pay that much. Thanks for meeting with us."
I'm assuming that you've done your homework and know what a reasonable top of the range is. If that's the case, just say what your number is and let them decide if it's too much.
The candidate has just as much if not more ambiguity and uncertainty as the employer, so why is the burden on the candidate?
It's very possible for a candidate to be thinking something like "I'm currently making $200K. I think it's possible I could get $300K, but $250K would probably be acceptable, and I might even settle for a lateral move of $200K if I find the position really appeals to me." What should they say? $300K and possibly price themselves out? $200K and possibly lowball themselves?
Really just seems like candidates don't want to do these negotiation process.
I was surprised with how much I was able to get away with negotiating my first tech job. It was a little bit of back and forth, a recruiter was involved, and I could just poker face my way into a six-figure job.
If they say 200k are you want to just say 250k and see if you get it.
Like everything it's just quicker and easier if you rip off the band-aid and just do it.
> wow, 185k, that's awesome" & they'll figure it out that the company was willing to pay upto 350k for the same work.
I’m nowhere near the Bay Area, I know what Bay Area salaries are by looking at publicly available sites.
I also know while I never made above $160K until starting at my first “FAANG” two years ago working remotely, there is no way in hell I would accept less than $250K - $300K to ever give up my big house in the burbs in a much lower cost of living area and that’s only because my kids have already graduated and my wife and I could stay in a smaller place and not worry about the school system.
Well I personally would never work a job where I had to go into an office again.
> just for the privilege to be low-balled or even worse denied
I'm ok being denied. You set the bar and I don't meet it, fair enough... far worse is wasting my time when a simple discussion about salary at the start (at least after the first interview) could have saved us both time.
Everyone is talking about this from the perspective of cushy tech jobs and forgetting that this applies to _all_ job postings. The vast majority of the population isn't bargaining from nearly the same position.
These benefits that we're experiencing by being able to just walk away from an onslaught of recruiters begging anyone with +5yoe don't apply to other job sectors or even entry-level positions in tech!
Can you bring it up early? Yeah. Should it be in the job listing? Absolutely. I've yet to see a convincing argument otherwise.
> I'm not about to go through 3 phone screens, a take-home test, a full-day onsite, etc. just for the privilege to be low-balled or even worse denied.
Maybe I got lucky but I've always been able to figure out the rough range they were thinking of paying before the first real interview. In case of recruiters, sure, they want to talk to you first and that's 15 minutes you'll never get back.
Personally I just don't move ahead unless I have some signal about salary to not get into that situation.
It's never that simple. If it were, that's how it would turn out to be and in some places it is. Just one example why it's not that simple - you might have an ad running for a role with no seniority attached. You're open to all seniority, because you need all. Do you open all three ranges in the ad, in the convo? It might be that simple but it closes the door to another convo which might be, after you hear out the company's needs and present yourself, you might offer to jump to the occasion and offer an extended role of yourself above what you were before (a step up) and ask for more. Now what? There's no room to go either way anymore in negotiation but down from the top of the budget.
There's no black and white, fits all, thing. Never is that simple. The only fair thing I saw so far is along the lines of if there's any indication that company is decent and you're interested in a role, if you pass a filter to get a call: do the short intro about the company and the people and the role, do the short intro (after company intro, that's important because you can tune your self-presentation) about yourself and then go a bit back and forth on the expectations from both ends, including financials. If all things are aligned then you proceed forward. If there's no talk about financials on that call, not worth it or if there's no indication there's an honest answer we have to see since we're talking about outside of what we initially even asked for but here we are - offered more. Getting low-balled there, in such environments, is hard since the day you start you get to feel and know that you, indeed, were.. and what did company accomplish with that then? Nothing good. Overall, that's about half an hour or so IF there's indication that company has good reputation. If not, or a startup, or you're just shotgunning it across to get to the high score (and hopping) - there's no help, it's a gamble where number indicated will help but will also close a lot of real good opportunities.
If neither prospective employee nor employer talk about salary up-front before investing many hours with interviews, travel, etc. that's just simply a screwup on both sides.
This salary range thing won't fix that. Ready? The job listing is now "$100k to $200k depending on experience." If you are making $140k and hoping to make $160k the range doesn't help you at all. You still better talk about salary up front!
I make $60k because my company underpays and I don't work in tech where jobs tend to be very cushy and compensation information abounds! I start seeing job listings for my position with a floor of $80k. Wow I just made $20k more thanks to reducing information asymmetry!
For a real example, I had plenty of recruiters and companies that _refused_ to "talk numbers" until the end of the process. Now that I'm further along in my career and finances I have the luxury of being able to shop around and kick companies to the curb that don't suit me.
When I was first leaving college and had no income and little/no savings? A huge power imbalance in favor of the companies and I personally didn't feel comfortable pressing about salary. A law like this that I could have pointed to to just say "you have to tell me, them's the rules" could have had immeasurable impact on my career.
This law obviously doesn't solve every situation, but you must be able to see the information asymmetry and power imbalance that exists that this will help resolve?
This. As an employer, we ask rough salary expectations up front. We take into account seniority, experience etc… in adjusting the salary to match a person’s worth too.
We do an initial 15 -20 minute screening interview. One of the questions we ask is what is your desired salary range? If it is out of range of what we are willing to pay for you experience and skill set level, we don’t do a follow up. Process closed.
> > if the ad doesn't specify salary...just don't apply.
> So all job postings before these laws have been put into effect? Looks like someone doesn't understand how the world really works.
I think it does actually work like this a lot of the time. Either the candidate doesn't bother to apply, or they apply because they got a salary estimate from another source.
A relatively unknown company that isn't posting salary info is kind of a red flag.
> A relatively unknown company that isn't posting salary info is kind of a red flag
I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality than others in this thread. Even in tech I've had to put in a ton of legwork to find salary estimates for jobs and often the data was very incomplete. Combine the weirdness with roles/titles that companies can have, how do you search for salary info for "assistant to the guru of front-end"? Am I a devops engineer, SWE.Is there different pay for being on-call?
Not to mention it being even worse for everyone I've talked to that doesn't work in tech. Basically everyone I know has gotten the best salary info from the source, during the interview process.
In the rare exceptions, they are actively looking to leave their current job and are worried about cash-flow or even more extenuating circumstances like deciding whether or not to change careers.
I've _never_ seen a company offer salary information (numbers) in the job listing unless it was explicitly required by law (CO, soon to be CA and NYC, government jobs, etc).
I'm not saying it's the norm to post salary, and I'm not defending companies that don't. But some companies do, and some job seekers won't apply unless they do.
In the September HN who's hiring thread, two of the first four posts include salary info. Remote, and NYC.
So at-best 50% in a small pool that's already selection-biased 18 ways to Sunday? These laws apply to _all_ job postings. The benefits are, I admit, smaller for experienced tech workers for a myriad of reasons, but the societal/worker benefit across the entire population is huge.
Make it the law that you post how much you're willing to work for on your LinkedIn profile and that you have to supply it to employers at the start of an application process so neither side is wasting time.
Seems like that would address all your complaints just as well.
Because the employers already have more information than the employees. The whole point is to level the playing field. Your suggestion just gives the employers more data.
Because that gives employers more leverage to push salaries down, and makes it more likely that workers will be exploited.
The point of this legislation is to push salaries up by forcing employers to reveal their hiring budget up front. That way, prospective employees can more easily shop around for the highest salary.
It is hard to convince someone they are wrong when their salary depends on being right. But I'm going to try. I've done hiring myself as a founder, so I have some experience here.
> The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone.
Then they need better data. A great way to get that would be looking at all the other job listings with salary ranges if they don't already have access to back channel data.
> It is also true that a single job ad might be aiming to employ a number of people at various positions of seniority and experience.
Then it should be multiple listings with different requirements, even if the only difference is years of experience.
> So it does not surprise me that governments would legislate to require job ads to do the same - essentially because of ignorance about how the world works.
The way the government does it is more equitable, so it makes sense that they are trying to legislate that to the private sector.
> If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
It's that easy - if the ad doesn't specify salary and that is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't apply.
This is exactly the problem. If they aren't required to list it, they won't. And this is harmful to people who aren't good negotiators. And also harmful to women and minorities, as countless studies have shown they are chronically underpaid in large part because they aren't willing or able to negotiate.
That's why there is a push to force companies to list the salaries.
> Far more important is to know the salary target that you are aiming for.
You're right! The best way for me to know what salary to target is with lots of data about how much similar jobs pay. A great way to get that is job listings with salary ranges, since I don't have access to data like the person offering the job does.
>> The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone.
> Then they need better data. A great way to get that would be looking at all the other job listings with salary ranges if they don't already have access to back channel data.
You're missing the point: the variable is the candidate, not the role. I know the market rate for a candidate that is just over-the-bar for my role, and I know that market rate for a super-star who can not only do this role, but is probably already capable of doing the next one.
> Then it should be multiple listings with different requirements, even if the only difference is years of experience.
So, what if you apply for a role that turns out to be wrong for you based on my assessment of you then I should reject you so you can re-apply for the other role? That's ridiculous.
> I know the market rate for a candidate that is just over-the-bar for my role, and I know that market rate for a super-star
Great, then you know the good faith range and you're good to go.
> then I should reject you so you can re-apply for the other role
In my experience this happens all the time at big corps and the government. Except it's not a rejection, just an "oh actually we have this other open job on the books that would be a better fit - let's transfer you over to that"
> I know the market rate for a candidate that is just over-the-bar for my role, and I know that market rate for a super-star who can not only do this role, but is probably already capable of doing the next one.
Those are going to be two vastly different numbers. Which one are you looking to pay for? If you have budget for a superstar, why would you settle for just-over-the-bar talent?
I kind of find myself suspecting that what you're really hoping for is that you'll find someone who has superstar talent, but doesn't know their market rate, so you can hire them at just-over-the-bar money.
It's so rare for a superstar not to know their market rate as to be unlikely.
What I can see happening is that more corporations start doing SDE 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12, with different ranges, and most of the interviews are at 7-10 and are "releveled" at 3-5. We will end up in the same place we started but with more games.
> It's so rare for a superstar not to know their market rate as to be unlikely
You're no-true-scotsmanning 'superstar' here to assume, I suspect, that one of the attributes of a superstar is being in the know, and so on top of the industry and job market that they are aware how much their skills are worth.
For a certain class of superstar that may be true, but there are many, many very strong developers who are working in backwater job markets and have not looked for jobs in a while who literally have no idea what typical total comp offers from serious tech companies in hot markets are like.
There are plenty of high skilled people who have been blown away by an offer they thought was incredibly generous, only to discover they were actually lowballed.
> There are plenty of high skilled people who have been blown away by an offer they thought was incredibly generous, only to discover they were actually lowballed.
Been there done that - Not incredibly low balled. But probably 10%. But as you learn the industry, have a network of former coworkers who don’t mind sharing salaries and external recruiters, it gets easier and you just job hop. This is mostly on the enterprise/Corp dev side of development where most developers work.
It’s quite easy to find out compensation for the larger more well known tech companies at places like levels.fyi.
Before anyone thinks I’m putting down “enterprise developers”, that’s what I did my entire career from 1996-2020.
For all intents and purposes, that’s still what I do. I now also write a shit ton of yaml, HCL, PowerPoint slides, and PRFAQs at $BigTech and “consult”.
> Which one are you looking to pay for? If you have budget for a superstar, why would you settle for just-over-the-bar talent?
Having done a fair amount of hiring over decades... because you don't know who will show up.
The minimum bar of the job description is who I need at least. But occasionally someone shows up who is insanely perfect, hitting on every optional wishlist item. I'll pay a lot more for that person, but I can't count they will apply because I can't wait a year for the perfect person to show up. So I'm also happy to hire someone at the minimum bar if that's how it goes.
Well maybe the goal is increase features / month, and they want to hire a few people to do that. A just-over-the-bar will be a small increase, and a superstar will be a big increase. They don't particularly care about the mix as long as the total is big enough.
If you tell me the salary range is $200-300k and you offer me $400k I’m not going to be upset. If you offer me $125k, I will be. If I knew up front you had three roles, one paying $75-$125k, one $200-300k, and one $400-500k I could judge for myself what the chances were of the one I’m interested in (or higher). If you refuse to make ranges or publish $75k-$500k I have no idea if we are wasting each other’s time. It’s used car sales tactics.
Adding a different listing for every job instead of role just means applicants can’t find the listing that fits them. So we end up with “senior” listings that are looking to hire engineers for 100k but would be willing to pay 300 for the perfect fit. Adding putting a range of 100-300 probably just pisses people off, especially since almost all of the offers are going to be in the 100 area since most employees are necessarily average. If you just say the range is 100-150 then the people you offer 300 probably just won’t apply.
I’m not sure if you meant to disagree with me, but I’m perfectly okay with having three roles each with a salary range, job description, and required experience / skills. That allows the applicant to know what bar he needs to hit to get the salary he’s interested in.
> So, what if you apply for a role that turns out to be wrong for you based on my assessment of you then I should reject you so you can re-apply for the other role? That's ridiculous.
No of course not. You simply offer the better role at the higher salary. Or if they turn out to not be good, you tell them that you are going to deny them this role because they are not qualified, but you'd be happy to offer the lower role if they are interested. In fact, I'll bet this will happen a lot as a workaround for this law.
If the only way to operate realistically is to engage in some form of borderline-compliant workaround then I suggest the entire exercise is ill-conceived.
At least in that case I can read the job descriptions of low, medium, and high before applying. If I don’t know where my salary expectations line up with the company’s job requirements at all there’s a higher chance of wasting my time.
The question was specifically about hiring for multiple positions at different levels of seniority. If your company is hiring for positions with differentiated responsibilities and expectations for pay, you can advertise multiple jobs and shouldn't have to make anything up.
Sure, if you can talk your boss/executive that a candidate is a true super-star and you should pay over the published range, why not?
The goal of this law, and others like it, is fixing the bottom end of the range to prevent low ball offers from employers that know women and minorities (and others) frequently undervalue themselves.
"This is convenient for corporations so suck it up." isn't a very compelling argument. The purpose of the government is to represent the interests of the people in situations where there is sufficient agreement to pass legislation. If your company doesn't like complying with local laws, its easy, just don't look for people in this country. The people have a right to set the terms of exchanges in the marketplace.
That's a fairly uncharitable way to phrase his point. I think what he's getting at is that it is hard for market participants to accurately price goods and services when they are working with insufficient information.
If I asked you to tell me how much you'd pay for a shirt, you'd either have to give me a wide range, or start asking questions to understand what you're getting. A formal tux dress shirtfront? A dirty old Hanes undergarment?
No, I wouldn't say it is uncharitable at all. The balance of power and information already lies on the side that does more of these negotiations, and has less to lose in each one. It's time that balance starts to swing the other way, and if corporations don't like it, too damn bad.
If you don't have those questions at least mostly answered, you're not ready to go shopping. You don't show up at Target looking to buy a bespoke dress shirt, unless you want to be very disappointed and/or waste a lot of time.
Both a tux and an undershirt are unlikely to meet the same requirements. If you ask for 10 years experience in a field (tuxes), you’re likely to get people with similar qualifications or you can filter out the bad matches (undershirts) ahead of time.
I’ve had overqualified people apply for a position, what happens is I don’t hire them in that position, I open up a new “named hire” for a higher salary.
A job advertisement is meant to address the major questions a candidate would have that will contextualize the pay being offered. If I asked you to tell me how much to pay for a shirt with a sufficiently detailed list of requirements and expectations for the shirt, you could probably give me a pretty useful range.
Companies absolutely have fixed hiring budgets and salary guidelines. It's not that surprising to me, though, that if they don't have to share that with an external recruiter they will choose not to. You're probably on a percentage of the final hiring salary, so why would they tell you the max salary they're willing to offer? Your interests are not aligned.
The way it works in most companies that are big enough to have, like, distinct departments for HR and finance, is that teams have staffing budgets that are set out quarterly or annually, and if the team is expanding they will set those numbers to be big enough to cover the cost of the additional headcount they plan to add. Then the HR organization will probably have a compensation policy, which sets out ranges of rates for particular roles by level and geography. So your budget for a role lines up to certain job levels you can afford to hire at.
So by the time you're writing a job description looking for '5 years of react experience, located in NY' or whatever, you're pretty much narrowed in on a salary range that depends on 1) what your HR compensation guide says is the minimum compensation you pay for a level N software developer in that geo, and 2) the absolute maximum of your staffing budget allocated to the role.
If you can't turn that into a salary range for job advertising purposes, you're not a serious business.
Companies might not have HR hire until 50 people or so. Level of how much compensation levels or bands are figured out (and how big of a mess they are) varies in companies.
Even large companies, you might have variety of starting salaries, because you had to get the person in, which then needs fixed over time.
Also each new type of role you open, you might not have the bands figured out right at the time you write the job post. Your comp benchmarks might say 75th percentile is $160k. Then you talk to folks and seems like most are making $170k or more. Then you end up finding someone more or less senior but you would like to hire them and have to adjust the comp based on their experience while balancing it against other people and roles at company.
IMO comp is one of the hardest things to get right. You might do a comp philosophy that everyone gets paid $200k and you don’t negotiate but then you lose candidates and then overpay some people.
Then someone might still complain that if it’s fair that iOS engineer makes the same as Android engineer, even though market rate is higher for iOS engineers (and eventually the iOS engineers might leave to get a better paying job).
Advertising a role with a stated salary mark of 160k when candidates are looking for 170k is precisely how you find out that your salary expectations are wrong.
Bonus: you find out before you have to go to the trouble of interviewing and extending an offer.
> Companies absolutely have fixed hiring budgets and salary guidelines.
Yes, they hay budgets and salary guidelines.
All of that is negotiable as a hiring manager. Just a matter of how many levels up the chain you need to go to get the approval and whether you (hiring manager) can convince them, which depends on how strong the candidate is.
If someone told you you are a ‘hiring manager’ but you don’t have responsibility for the budget that hire comes out of, they are lying to you to make you feel important.
Hiring requires money. If you have to go ask someone else for that money, they are the one doing the hiring.
I can tell you first-hand, that's common. I control the hiring but not the ultimate say in the budget. Up to $X I can approve the hire, up to $YY I need to seek VP approval, up to $ZZZ I need SVP approval, up to $LOTS I need CEO approval. But all of those are feasible, given the right candidate. There is no hard ceiling on the budget, it's all about who I can convince.
The just a wee bit pedantic. In my position, I control my employees' salaries (within guidelines). But, if I want to add headcount I need to make my case to my VP or higher. I suppose I could fire 5 seniors developers and hire 10 junior developers with the freed up budget, but I definitely cannot conjure up the $200k+ required to hire an additional employee without approval from my boss or his boss.
Far more important is to know the salary target that you are aiming for.
I think people would be more willing to accept this if the application process was not such a complete cluster fuck 99% of the time.
So many sites want you to upload a resume, and then also re-type the whole thing into some clunky form so that the company can seemingly index it or search it or whatever
Then after your resume has been randomly selected for review you get to waste more time with useless recruiters and/or HR people for some kind of preliminary screening process that makes little sense.
If you're lucky enough to actually start to enter a real interview process you can plan to sink another 2-8 hours of your time before the discussion of salary ranges is even remotely danced around.
Finally, after a ton of hassle you learn that the company wishes to pay approximately minimum wage for this position and wants to pay you in IOU's, bottle caps, or gift vouchers (only a slight exaggeration sometimes).
If a company cannot give a salary range that is even +/- 20%, perhaps they're not actually ready to make a job posting and invite people to hopelessly waste their time on the application process.
Over the 2+ decades I've been working in this industry, the list of things that are expected out of an interview process just keeps growing. Intense panel interviews, coding on whiteboards, "show me your github", "do this example project", etc. Tell me your life story. What makes you passionate?
They often drag on for weeks, sometimes months, before an actual offer letter is in hand. And at the same time we're told that there's a shortage of us software engineers.
I can tell you it wasn't like this in the 90s. For better or for worse.
So don't be surprised that many of us are becoming incredulous that in addition to all of this, we can't get an upfront answer in advance about how much you will eventually pay me.
(I've also been confronted, very late in the process, with "your requested range is unreasonable because look at this compensation survey we bought from a third party" -- and that survey was full of complete lies because it listed total comp for Google L4 in my region as literally 1/2 of what I was making as an L4 at Google.)
So, I dunno, unless the job market really goes tits up and we're all suddenly begging for work, seems like your side of the industry -- the recruitment side -- needs to get its act together. I'm seeing growing dissatisfaction with the whole process and people are getting sick of the song and dance.
I've gone through exactly one of these types of interviews, and that was at a FAANG. I have since turned down every single offer to interview with a company that did something similar. The one time I did so by phone, it was kind of amusing (and telling) that the company's headhunter was utterly shocked that I was unwilling to fly across the country to do some whiteboard sessions with the team. They clearly targeted FAANG washouts, and weren't accustomed to speaking with a senior developer who could afford to be picky about the interviews he took.
The important thing is, there are plenty of companies that don't pretend to be FAANGs, and don't interview like that. Odds are pretty good that working for them won't be like working at a FAANG either, which (imho) is also a good thing.
> The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone. … I say "I think it will be about $X, but lets put a job ad up and indicate it's top of range $ and see who we get."
As someone pointed out, it sounds like this isn't too hard to do. I've hired people, I've come up with salary ranges. It took some thought, I didn't particularly enjoy the process, but it's possible.
> It is also true that a single job ad might be aiming to employ a number of people at various positions of seniority and experience.
"We're hiring for 10 widget programmers, x senior, y mid, z junior. The salary ranges for these are … and will depend on the skills and experience of the individual candidate"
> It's that easy - if the ad doesn't specify salary and that is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't apply.
I've skipped job adverts in the past because the salary wasn't specified. People care about the wage, it's an incredibly important part of what work is, getting paid, it's one of the largest parts of the deal. Pretending that the wage doesn't matter because your company is special, or because people shouldn't be in it for the money is BS that basically everyone can see through and coming to that realisation will allow companies to have a much better understanding of the relationship they have with with their current and future employees.
Or, if the wage is important after all and you just couldn't be bothered to work it out? I guess just put a bit more time in and work it out. Or don't, and be skipped over.
As someone who sometimes hires people, I'd very much prefer it if all the people that applied had already self-selected on something as simple as the red line that is what people will expect to earn. I really don't want to have to trawl through a load of resumes for people, selecting them for interview, doing the first round etc. only to discover that they want n*2 more than we're offering.
> EDIT: lots of unhappy responses to this, but don't shoot the messenger. Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works.
It sounds like you've missed the point of the responses then. They aren't telling you that you're wrong, they're telling you that how recruiting works needs to change.
> The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone. Until they have met them, assessed them, heard what they salary target is and weighed it up against their skills and experience and calibrated it against the team.
One of the reasons I want to know the salary range upfront is that it tells me the bare minimum they are paying for that position. Companies love lowballing candidates, so I usually don't apply for an offer that doesn't pay at least the minimum I'm looking for.
> Far more important is to know the salary target that you are aiming for.
It's also important to know the company's budget. I don't enjoy working at places that can't afford a $200/year IDE license, to name a common example. Fat salaries often come with fat budgets.
> If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
If it makes recruiters and employers mad that they have to include salary ranges in their job listings, that's just too bad, and they will just have to get over it and follow the law.
Thankfully legislators are cracking down on this type of entitlement that's coming from recruiters and employers alike.
You contradict yourself when you say employers don't know what they would be willing to pay someone, but then somehow manage to come up with a number when they start recruiting. You even say you would post a job ad with that range? That's what the law wants, so I don't actually understand what you're arguing against here.
If it's genuinely true that a company has no idea what they might pay someone they want to hire, they're just not ready to hire someone. "It's that easy."
> Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works.
I've been the team lead and talk to my team lead about this a lot and I know of no serious tech companies that don't actively think about employee retention and recruiting a huge part of which is compensation. Leadership at my company spends a serious amount of time discussing and revising our TC targets.
Any company that doesn't know what "they would be willing to pay someone" is a huge red flag for me as a candidate, and I can be quite confident that they aren't willing to even reach the salary component of my comp let alone meet or beat TC.
So what is the precise number you pay your senior developers?
Sorry to call you out, but I simply don't believe the answer is anything but "it depends on a range of factors". Unless it is a government job, but even then, likely it depends on a range of factors, and often even government clients flex their budget to meet their recruiting goals.
I'm no longer in a management position and wouldn't post what is currently private company info on HN, but I'll tell you how it worked at literally every company I've worked at that is not a very small startup:
There is an internal document that specifies each level and the exact comp bands for each role (like all companies there is a range of salaries but it is specified, and again this is the practice a multiple companies I've worked at). There is a lower and upper bound of salary for level, target bonuses are fixed at a percent for ranges of levels and the same goes for equity grants.
The details of what defines each level of seniority is clearly spelled out in terms of typical ranges of previous experience, responsibilities of the role, reporting structure, assumed level of autonomy etc. These are also calibrated across teams at each review cycles and continually kept up to date.
During interviews there are set guidelines for how well a candidate performs given the target level of the role they are applying for an assess which level is appropriate.
This is not the same as saying
"don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone."
and
"it depends on a range of factors"
At every company that is not sub 100 employees that "range of factors" is clearly defined. I honestly have a hard time believing you've worked recruiting for any major tech company and haven't come across similarly detailed documentation regarding levels, comp bands, and evaluation of candidates.
It's ok if it depends on a range of factors, but those factors should be detailed in the job posting. The candidate should be able to read the ad and calculate what their salary would likely be based on the company's salary determination process.
Most importantly, the ad should reveal the position's maximum salary, so job seekers know how much money is on the table. Ideally, median and average salaries would also be listed.
>>the ad should reveal the position's maximum salary,
Noble goal that I feel is completely naive about human psychology.
I believe that exceedingly few of us have sufficient self-awareness and humility to see a range of e.g. "100-200k", and recognize easily that our performance and skill and history and capability is worth 120k, and will not feel scammed and underappreciated.
The prevailing wisdom on HN is empathically NOT "be happy with what you're worth", it's "ask for more more more", completely prior to any discussion of person's actual history, skillset, contribution, productivity, etc. And that's OK! We are human beings and inherently selfish and if we don't look after ourselves, who will? But it's disingenuous to then pretend that publication of a salary range will have any outcome other than all candidates expecting the top or slightly above... and I personally feel that will only result in employers pushing down the salary to match the average candidate.
They have the option to keep looking in their job search if they feel like they are not being valued enough.
If they interviewed around and all offers they received were around ~120k, then it should be a wake up call that their expectations do not match reality.
You know they don't pay a single number, but have a defined range for the role.
And if they find someone who is outside that range, they will bump them up to the next role with the bigger range.
When I worked at eBay the salary bands for each level were well defined and shared internally. If they needed to pay you more than the top of the range, they bumped you to the next level to do it.
It would be very easy for them to publish the ranges publicly.
>If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
Well, not for long, if I live in NYC and this rule passes.
>It's that easy - if the ad doesn't specify salary and that is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't apply.
If this type of regulation spreads, we can just turn this into a nifty fliparoo counter-argument: It's that easy - if not posting a salary range is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't post. Maybe ask the HR manager to do a quick skills upgrade and program in C# themselves.
Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works.
LOL. I've never listed a position without knowing the salary range ahead of time. That range comes from our comp/ben team in concert with somebody from finance.
> employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone
They know, they know. They just don't want to be the first one to putting numbers out there, because they want to low ball as much as they can.
I clearly remember, in one of my latest interview, the recruiter mentioning an internal system of theirs that would come up with "numbers", and my numbers were way off, so they
couldn't make it work.
Knowing, at least a ball park range, it would have saved me time and stress.
They must have a range in mind:
- average candidate $x
- good candidate $y
- awesome candidate $z
Therefore they could just ads for $x-$z signaling they won't be able to go above $z. So a candidate can at least decide if it is worth interviewing or not.
> I'm a recruiter. I've known for a long time it drives people nuts that job ads don't have salary, or have a wide salary range.
Do you think it's true that you may be biased a certain way? Perhaps not in favor of job seekers?
> It is also true that a single job ad might be aiming to employ a number of people at various positions of seniority and experience.
Perhaps include separate descriptions for junior/senior roles?
> If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
Why do you expect the candidate to have to change their mindset?
> Far more important is to know the salary target that you are aiming for.
Wouldn't having these ranges let a candidate become more informed about their salary target? Markets and salary ranges change over time, this would let them know what is current.
If your client tells you secretly that the base salary range for the position is 200K-250K. And the prospective employee tells that s/he wants 150K. Would you disclose that s/he can ask up to 250K or would you rather make your client happy by getting them a bargain?
>> would you rather make your client happy by getting them a bargain
Recruiters are usually paid based on a percentage of the salary. It's actually in the interests of the recruiter that you are paid as much as possible, strictly speaking.
In reality, my goals as recruiter are:
* happy client
* find a new employee who the employer is super happy with six months down the track
* find a new employee who wants and enjoys this job, and will thus stay
* at a salary that the new employee is happy with, that will not have them looking over their shoulder thinking they have udnersold themselves
* at a salary that will ensure we are not beaten to the punch by another higher paying employer
* at a salary that fits the goals of the employer
The idea of "getting an employer a bargain" implies that I don't care about the job seeker. Believe it or not, I do. When someone comes to me who is a great developer, and is asking under market rates, I discuss that will them and let them know where I think market rate is for their skills and experience.
It might sound cliched, but my job is to negotiate a deal that everyone is happy with, and every gets what they want. Anything less will fail because the employee feels they are underpaid, or the employer feels they overpaid.
I believe the above approach to dealing with salary gets everyone what they want. And yes, I the more it is the happier I am, but it would be very much against my interests to manipulate that.
> Recruiters are usually paid based on a percentage of the salary. It's actually in the interests of the recruiter that you are paid as much as possible, strictly speaking.
Similar studies for real estate agents who are also paid on commission shows that this is not true. It’s more about velocity than optimizing a single candidate.
> Recruiters are usually paid based on a percentage of the salary. It's actually in the interests of the recruiter that you are paid as much as possible, strictly speaking.
Seems like a recruiter is much more likely to double his compensation by spending half as much time per hire versus paying twice as much, given that salaries are relatively inelastic. Similarly, real estate agents are incentivized to get a pretty good price but mostly optimize for lower effort per sale.
Thank you! It's almost exactly the same as real estate agents or anyone who takes a small % of a transaction: they are incentivized to prioritize throughput above (and often at the expense of) anything else.
And yet, I've been screwed over by recruiters many times.
Simply because recruiting is a very low barrier job - you get countless bad recruiters... even at reputable recruitment agencies - horrible child-recruiters.
Much like real estate agents, their best interest is to close the deal at any price. They'll make more money getting the employer a bargain and a second req.
There is a reason real estate agents homes sell for more than anyone else's -- because they know the real value of the market and have an incentive to go high when it's their own home. Recruiters are the same.
Sounds like HR at those companies has no clue what they are doing. I work for a Fortune 100 company. Everyone has a very specific job title and everyone with the same job title is guaranteed to make the exact same amount as anyone else with the same job title. They have a third party company come in and do a review yearly to make sure that is the case. We are not able to create new job titles without a lot of work. So, we always know exactly what the salary will be for anyone we are trying to hire.
Some of the responses here are a classic case of Fundamental Attribution Error - I see a lot of assumptions that imply that the employers must not be adding salaries because they are malicious or bad actors (which, of course there are some). But the overwhelming majority of these employers probably don't even know for themselves the salary that they're willing to pay, since compensation is highly variable based upon the individual's experience and complex market factors.
Should they all have better data, better perspectives, and better job specs? Sure thing. I agree. You'd hire much better people, that's for sure.
On the other hand, should we regulate them into compliance on this matter? Ironically, it seems like a great opportunity to add inefficiency and possibly even have a net negative impact on salaries.
I say, let them ship crappy job descriptions and let the market sort it out.
> On the other hand, should we regulate them into compliance on this matter? Ironically, it seems like a great opportunity to add inefficiency and possibly even have a net negative impact on salaries.
It adds the inefficiency of a job poster spending 5-60 minutes figuring out a salary range.
It removes the inefficiency of hours and hours and hours of interviews from people that wouldn't have applied if they knew the salary range.
It's not like hiring someone is cheap. Companies can and should put this effort into ads.
If you're trying to hire for a $100k+ role, it should not be a problem to take an afternoon to look up job postings for similar roles and figure out an appropriate salary range.
I think it's to the benefit of the vast majority of job seekers, reducing the economic power imbalance between employer and employee, and I'd personally consider that a worthwhile reason to pass a law in and of itself. In addition, I suspect it's also to the benefit of most employers, many of which are not actually large enough to squeeze any appreciable benefit out of salary secrecy but who would gain from having more information about labor prices.
To put it more simply: the socialist in me thinks it's good for workers -- the liberal in me thinks it's good for fairer competition in the labor market. Win-win.
My aversion to bureaucracy makes me hate the idea of the government adding more red tape, especially on something as trivial as poorly written job posts. I feel like we learned nothing from GDPR cookie banners.
But nonetheless, I don’t think your point is invalid.
This has never been a popular / well received message on HN, but jives with my experience 100%.
I've been a techie in the same company for 20 years; then I've become a lead and therefore hiring manager last few years.
I'll open a seat for something I need, and may be able to specify a range of levels/bands that we are acceptable; but the salary hugely depends on the person - primarily their skills, experience, knowledge, history, as well as (again unpopular but realistic) how well they interview. I may have a team of 5 ops managers and need a sixth one; I'm OK hiring a junior band 6 out of school to fully train up for salary X, or a reasonably experienced one for band 7 or 8 for salary Y; and if I happen to receive a resume for an exceptionally, uniquely qualified candidate with expertise with client or type of client and/or software/system/business we're working for, I might be willing to hire them as band 9 for salary Z.
With that in mind, what's the end-game here?
a) Publish full range of all possibilities - e.g. $60,000 -> $150,000? That's is true and accurate but it's not useful (and see human-psychology disclaimer below).
b) Publish a specific smaller range, and miss out on good candidates on both sides of the range.
To your point, government publishes their rate but that is because they aim, intentionally and knowingly, to mediocrity and not meritocracy. The bell curve is artificially flattened. It's a different system and goal. But I'm OK if my teams have a bell curve! Nobody is born at the edge, and I'm usually on projects big enough that I can train people up :)
(As well, what most people won't admit, is that very few of us are happily aware of our actual performance and will happily take salary that matches it - e.g. in the medium of range for medium of performance; so large companies may well end up moving to a boring average, depressed salaries for all, because if I publish range of e.g. 60-150k, how many people will willingly admit they only have experience/history/skills for e.g. 85k?)
> a) Publish full range of all possibilities - e.g. $60,000 -> $150,000? That's is true and accurate but it's not useful (and see human-psychology disclaimer below).
This is very useful. For example, anyone wanting more than a minimum of $60k can skip applying.
> b) Publish a specific smaller range, and miss out on good candidates on both sides of the range.
I do not see how this is possible, especially on the lower side. No one is going to skip past your job listing because the minimum pay is higher than they expect, and no one is limiting you on how high to set your max pay.
> lots of unhappy responses to this, but don't shoot the messenger
Generally it is assumed that the messenger is a relatively neutral party, like a courier or a postman. A recruiter has a lot of input into how that message is delivered and some insider knowledge, so they aren't completely neutral. I imagine companies want recruiters to take a few shots for them.
> Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works.
Salary ranges are posted in all job advertisements.
Yes, sometimes a company is just hiring for several potential roles at once with one listing.
The need for "more C# engineering skills on the team" might filled by a junior engineer for $X, a mid-career engineer for $1.5X, a senior engineer for $2X, or a rock star for $5x. (e.g. If you land a rock star, you might be able to focus on something else for your next hire.)
So, as a company, you put out a job posting for a C# engineer and say "the pay depends on how good you are." You don't want to lose the senior engineer by listing a pay range of $X and you don't want to miss the junior engineer by listing $2X. Not every hiring situation is as easy as "I need this exact cog for my machine and I'm willing to pay exactly X."
Not sure why a law is needed here. (I assume the intent is more to prevent discrimination than to un-frustrate tech job seekers, though I can't really see how it would do that.) I guess the easy solution for employers will be to either just list a very large range, or to post the same listing with several different comp bands. Either way they can still discriminate to their hearts' content during hiring.
All true, but simply give the 20th to 80th percentile comp as bands and state that above band comp is awarded in some cases.
I’ve worked in a hiring manager capacity for close to a decade, and we absolutely know the bands, despite them being quite wide.
Companies that are well run can succeed without hiding information from their employees… and it’s a huge waste of time to interview somebody whose expectations are totally mismatched
Every job in tech I have had (~10) have started with a recruiter reaching out to me, me asking the position range and then telling the recruiter I want the top of the range or more. No interviews with anyone in the company until the salary requirements are handled otherwise its just a waste of everyone's time. I couldn't imagine talking to someone to see if they want to hire me without knowing if its even worth it for me, it puts all the power in their hands.
I've never had a recruiter balk or push back on answering even for the roles I decided not to pursue. A recruiter doing so would be a huge flashing red light for me.
"If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
It's that easy - if the ad doesn't specify salary and that is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't apply."
Or the state could just pass a law making it a required field...
Your client is probably trying to limit your overhead.
I’ve hired hundreds or low thousands of people. Corporate, government, SMB. Never did i go into that process without a budget target or salary band with budget. I would say that to a contract shop or recruiter to avoid having a budget of $100, a bid for $101, and a contractor making $28
I don't mind if there are certain companies which don't want to list their salary range. However, they also need to be respectful of candidates' time and energy.
Recently I had a company reach out to me and after asking me many questions about my background for an hour, the recruiter asks me, "What is your salary expectation?". I said I would rather not say but would be happy to let them know if their range is acceptable to me. The recruiter rambles a bit about how they recruit from all over the world and then tells me that is not how they operate and I must give a number. I refused and they hung up.
Of course it is their prerogative if they don't want to provide the number or need my number up front. But then they can be upfront about it early in the call. They should not waste my time for an hour and drain my energy in the process.
The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone.
Bullshit. Maybe some start-up with no HR. But, any moderately sized company is buying salary info, working with compa ratios, and has internal salary ranges mapped to positions.
The situation you describe is real, sure. However, the situation you describe is far from the majority of recruitment. Most companies have a budget, most companies have a salary framework. Yes, in the minority of situations in which a company truly has no budget for a role then these rules don’t work very well… but that’s relevant to a tiny subset of the top end of the market, and at that level, job postings are much less important. The positive outcome of these rules far outweighs any inconvenience experienced by employers with no budget.
edit: regarding your edit, which companies have you recruited for? I would bet my own career that you’re wrong to suggest that recruitment works like this for more than 10% of companies.
> If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
Or, we could pass laws forcing companies to do this, and companies could get their shit together and figure out how much they're actually willing to pay.
The nice thing about market capitalism is that companies, for the most part, are fairly flexible. They may not be enthused about posting salary ranges, but if the law says they have to, they'll find a way to make it happen.
It's not entirely unlike how so many businesses prophecy doom and gloom when there's a minimum wage increase, or street parking gets replaced by bike lanes, but then the thing happens and it's generally fine.
Regarding your edit, we know how recruiting works. What people are genuinely upset about is the lack of empathy for the job seeker, who is wasting their time, in the game as you play it (and the strong assumption that this is the only way the game is played).
I think you’re confusing “don’t know” with “not willing to do the basic research on what they’re looking for because there is no reason to do so”.
Why would an employer spend any time thinking about the salary they’re willing to offer when there is no penalty for not doing so. The party that does suffer are the applicants who have to sit through many rounds of interviews before finding out the max salary the job is offering is a fraction of what they’re being paid right now.
The lack of transparency is a classic neutral-lose situation, where the neutral party has the power in the relationship dynamics. It’s the perfect situation for the govt to step in and require transparency.
I think many here will disagree, but this is spot on. Having a fixed salary range also implies there’s a fixed/well-defined set of tasks for that role, which is only applicable to typical lower-level jobs that do repetitive tasks. Once you get into higher skilled positions, the roles become much more flexible and negotiable.
The HN crowd is exactly the opposite type of people who would benefit from this. Job definitions become fixed. You want to try your next project in Rust? Implement a new database? Start learning the customer-facing side of things? Too bad, the job description didn’t include that, and your salary range is locked in to the job description.
While it seems logical that a fixed salary implies a fixed set of tasks, I don’t think it holds in practice. I’ve worked my share of fixed salary positions where the day-to-day looks nothing like the job posting. It seems all you have to do is add a clause like “and other duties as assigned”.
There is a chance your duties get so out of whack that you request HR to reinterpret your pay, but not only is that a laborious and somewhat arbitrary process, but it seems both HR and management are incentivized to not rule in the employees favor.
While this applies to public advertisements, once you are employed then I don't see why you or the company can't renegotiate based on changed responsibilities.
The important part is that employers post the maximum salary so that job seekers know what the budget is.
Employers should make a separate job ad for each pay grade, and they should provide a detailed explanation of how they determine salary. If the range is $150k to $250k, what are the criteria to make $250k? What's the difference between someone who makes $150k and $175k? That information belongs in the job posting.
I would argue for most people who are not exceptional, the important data is the minimum pay, which helps them identify employers to avoid or aspire to move on from.
Also, an increase in the minimum of the pay range can help people who were hired at lower pay rates know when new hires are getting paid more. Businesses love having this arbitrage opportunity, which is why the common advice is to change employers to maintain market rate pay.
You need to be respectful of everyone's time. If I apply to a position that will never offer me what I want to make then you just wasted my time and yours. You are asking me to be upfront about absolutely everything, I'm asking for one key detail. I do not think that you appreciate my side of this bargain at all. This is not a one-way deal, we need to cooperate and be able to work together toward a solution if this is ever going to work out. I'm choosing to work with you, not choosing you as my dictator. If you are not willing to work with me a little then I'm going to keep looking, your loss not mine.
I suppose if employers don't know what employees are worth - they certainly don't know what recruiters are worth? And I suppose that information assymetry works out in favour of the recruiters?
A previous employer of mine had fixed salary levels by role adjusted by region (for cost of living). Absolutely no salary negotiations, no bonuses. Despite this, they did the "offer not available in Colorado" routine as well as resisting requests for internal pay transparency. The "good reason" for not listing salary is that it makes it harder for prospective and current employees to comparison shop. Period.
Unless it's the core competency, companies are by definition conservative as all hell. They do not want to change ANYTHING unless they have to. Whenever the decision is "change something, or turn off X and not change anything" the latter will be the decision unless something forceful acts in the opposite direction.
They act this way even if "doing the thing" would be right, easy, good, productive, whatever.
The board and C-level also have a shared class interest (and, so often, personal relationships) with their peers at other companies that tends to outweigh any personal ethical interest they have in the wellbeing of their employees. If it doesn't gain any actual competitive advantage, better go with the option that keeps your old schoolmates and future business partners happy.
I have been searching for a job at least few times in the past few years. I’ve emailed/messaged probably 100s of tech companies asking for a salary range. Maybe one or two companies failed to give me the salary range. I have no idea what companies you work with, but from my experience most companies in tech know the salary ranges for the positions they hire for, they just require an extra effort from people to find out.
> Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works.
The point of laws such as these is to change how recruitment works. The fact that the hiring manager/person will offer more to a 6'4" person from their alma mater[1] more than a random person of average height with the same skillset is problematic - even if it is "how recruiting works"
> The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone. Until they have met them, assessed them, heard what they salary target is and weighed it up against their skills and experience and calibrated it against the team.
With few exceptions, what you wrote is not accurate. Most companies have salary bands for every position based on level within the band. Companies know both the position and level they have in mind for a candidate before the first on-site interview, and often before the initial screen. The interviews reveal what the leveling should be, and sometimes indicate a different role is more appropriate. The vast majority of companies will not negotiate outside those relatively tight bands for most IC and other low level (management) roles.
So having a target salary in mind is fine for an assessment of an offer, but not all that helpful if the goal is to not waste time up front. Some exceptional candidates might successfully negotiate for a bump in in-band level or even position, but it’s rare.
My company has recently posted internal salary ranges for job titles. There's the bottom of the range, a 33% mark, and the top of the range.
Everyone gets paid at least the bottom of the range. After proving competent they must be on the 33% mark. Some are paid above the top of the range but it's rare.
A given job family has different titles, broadly Junior-'Vanilla'-Senior-Principal. A junior might be on 25-45, vanilla on 35-55, a senior on 40-65, a principal on 55-80, or whatever (triple those for US wags I guess). That fits the "more experienced" part. You could advertise for a principal and find someone who just about scrapes in, so pay them 55, find someone great and offer them 80.
When advertising externally though, this information is not available - unless you know someone who already works there, which is crazy.
You’re not exactly just “the messenger” here. You posted several paragraphs explaining that a good chunk of your livelihood depends on this phenomenon of “not sharing data about pay.”
A messenger’s salary is independent of the opinionated slant of the information he conveys.
A lot of comments here saying corporations have hiring budgets and you're wrong, etc.
I guarantee you startups < 100 people do not actually have formal hiring budgets. A lot of people here haven't actually been employers before, and this comment is spot on when it comes to the reality.
Posting a salary range for many positions would only have the effect of making it look like you'd be able to get less than you actually could, because employers would always need to post the bottom of the range (since these laws have a maximum range you're allowed to post), which is dumb.
I wasn't an employer but I'm genuinely curious how is it possible that a company doesn't know what they are willing to pay for an employee of specific knowledge? They maybe don't have formal hiring budgets, but they know how much money they have, if some investments are coming, how much they pay other people on average, etc. Also, they obviously know the amount of money they are not willing to go over during the negotiation phase of the interview.
If they are looking for some super specific and rare skill, why not make a separate ad for that rare position? In that case if they are ready to pay 5x the market rate, they can put that in the salary range without influencing ranges of "normal" positions.
I was a CTO, we definitely had a budget in mind for every level of seniority. Idk what CTO you're working with, maybe the region you work within is biased for generating self appointed ctbros.
> And when you come into a position that requires recruiting, likely you'll speak to your recruiter and say "what do you think we'll need to pay for someone like this?".
And when I do this, I expect the recruiter to have an idea of the salary range for that position and be able to put it in the job posting. Otherwise we'll be looking for another recruiter.
> It is also true that a single job ad might be aiming to employ a number of people at various positions of seniority and experience.
Separate it into multiple job ads, with well defined requirements and salary ranges.
The role of the interview in that case is to simply determine if the candidate fits the desired requirements or not.
If a candidate applies to the position that doesn't fit their skills this will come up during the interview and the recruiter can tell the candidate that they are better suited for another position and inform them that the interview will continue as if they applied for the lower/higher position.
The company obviously knows how much they want to pay a candidate with certain skills and experience. So by making more detailed job descriptions there is no problem with posting salary ranges. Or if for some reason a company really insists on having one job ad for multiple positions of varying experience then they can put a salary range table where they state salary range for each possible position that a candidate might end up in after a successful interview process.
Sounds like this law may force employers to get their shit together and actually understand the roles they are hiring for and what they are willing to pay for those roles.
The way you describe employers, they could really use the push.
And then you end up exactly where the company I work for ended up, and where a ton of other companies end up: The same people, doing the same work, with very similar experiences, getting paid drastically different salaries. It can get so bad, that the company then has to hire an outside agency to review salaries, and then make company-wide adjustments. Running a business is very, very expensive and involves lots of things (like proper HR) that have nothing to do with the business for which the business exists. If you don't want to actually run a business, then maybe give it up.
I get why employers would hate this, but overall, wouldn't greater transparency in the labor market drive economic growth by virtue of making the labor market more efficient by doing a better job of connecting skilled, hard-working and motivated employees with employers who can pay more?
Most won't directly voice this, but I believe the primary objection from many employers is that there kinds of salary transparency laws raise the floor, since you know (roughly) what all of your colleagues are making.
In other words: software (like most other industries) relies in part on employees low-balling themselves (and stigma around sharing salary information), which is harder to do when you know what the actual salary band is.
In my opinion -- and I have no hard data to back this up, merely some limited personal experience -- the biggest issue employers will have about salary transparency is that it makes paying high performers high salaries more difficult.
Typically having a high performer on staff is a huge win for the employer. E.g., at one previous company, the top couple sales people were 10X performers compared to the median sales person. And they were compensated maybe 5X the median. A disgruntled employee found and leaked a document that listed everyone's compensation -- and the negative feelings that were generated towards the company and towards the highly paid sales people was profound. Part of the issue is that the 10X sales people did not necessarily work 10X harder, they just had the right set of personality traits, industry experience, and je ne sais quoi that made them able to bring in more and bigger clients. But many people feel intrinsically that compensation should be tied to effort and to those people it was upsetting to see coworkers who did not necessarily put in 5X more effort get 5X more money.
Edited to add: to be clear, I do not personally have a problem with pay being tied to results instead of to effort, but I saw first hand that many people have a different opinion about this.
It can be dealt by creating high-paying higher rungs on career ladder and then promoting the 10x people there. So, regular SE position can have a salary range of say $120k-$150k, but principal senior staff ninja can have say $400k-$600k. That's how FAANGs do it basically.
I see that as being more helpful from a regulatory point of view (i.e., by providing a limited defense against claims of pay discrimination) than from an employee morale point of view. E.g., when people express dissatisfaction over the fact that those in the C-suite make X times what the average employee does, pointing out that the people in the C-suite have different titles or roles from the average employee doesn't seem to assuage anybody.
Most complaints I hear about C-level pay boil down to claims that the roles themselves are overvalued, not that individuals are overpaid for the role. I think the value of an extremely highly-performing engineer is likely to be more apparent to the "rank and file" than that of an executive, especially at a company where employee morale is a serious concern.
No, you have gotten it all backwards. You are only allowed to use the more efficient market rationale when are you defending low wages and higher prices for regular people. Regular people getting higher wages is seen as a disease that must be stopped at all cost. [1]
An example is when companies have to increase their offers due to changing market conditions; currently they can just silently do that without telling existing employees. But with the new law existing employees have a way of finding it out so they will then go ask for a raise to match this range. Of course employeees are free to discuss salaries themselves but in America that’s still not normal and common.
Of course this is why current employees seem to leave all the time for other opportunities rather than getting raises and keeping knowledge inside the company.
HR: "Why do we have retention problems"
Also HR: "Pay the new people 1.5x, but don't tell anyone"
I don't think they'll hate it. If they know what a prospective employee is making, they can offer a minimal increment on that within their (wide) salary range.
Currently, only the employer knows their real budget (and that may change if they get the right candidate) and only the employee knows what they'll move for. Salary negotiation is based on those two secrets. This legislation makes the latter secret public knowledge.
The latter was already public knowledge, your entire salary history is probably available via The Work Number. This makes the former secret public knowledge.
Blimey, if your current salary is available at salary negotiation time then that's a much bigger problem then advertising salaries.
To your point: companies can advertise a big range, or create a new job title, for a job, or level you based on undecided job levels according to what they want to pay you. I don't think this legislation adds anything.
> only the employee knows what they'll move for ... This legislation makes [that] secret public knowledge.
Not everyone's motives is the same on this, so it's still secret. Some people will require more than a small bump to move into the risk of an unknown new employer.
Also, some people value flexibility (or rigidity), autonomy, etc. more than money - to the point where some people will pass substantial amounts of money if it means sacrificing real time with the fam.
Companies get a huge financial lift by underpaying some percentage of their employee base. Consider any company whose main cost is people, and revenue is roughly proportional to headcount. (Consultancy, school, security, etc)
Let’s say they can utilize an information asymmetry to underpay half their workforce by 10%. That cuts their cost by 5%, and it’s all to the bottom line. If they were a 10% net margin business, now they’re 15%.
This is why they fight transparency. It’s a form of price discrimination.
A libertarian might say “It’s a free market, and everyone enters the contract willingly.”
I am sympathetic to that, though markets tend to work most efficiently when there is more information.
The one downside is some remote jobs might not be available in New York any more. NYC wage levels make remote work more difficult from a cost arbitrage anyway.
Exactly, I'm a bit surprised that this needs to be legislated. Many people will not apply/respond to recruiters if the salary isn't posted. I'd think employers would be doing this simply because it makes things easier for them.
Pricing transparency eliminates economic triage and uncertainly: if you want to make $XXX, you don't have to apply to 10 different jobs and spend everyone's time determining whether they'll pay you $XXX.
You still don't know if they'll pay you $XXX. You only know that they claim that there exists some hypothetical employee to whom they'd in good faith imagine paying $XXX.
One of the criteria of a Perfectly Competitive Market is "Perfect Information":
"In economics, perfect information (sometimes referred to as "no hidden information") is a feature of perfect competition. With perfect information in a market, all consumers and producers have complete and instantaneous knowledge of all market prices, their own utility, and own cost functions. "
Transparency is literally one of the requirements for a theoretical efficient market. If buyers (companies) have asymmetrical information with sellers (laborers) there is room for inefficiency. Remove that and the market becomes more efficient.
This efficiency is seen as higher wages and lower profits, as we see with the skyrocketing in executive compensation after it was legally mandated to be public.
My biggest annoyance with most salary transparency law compliance is companies pretend they'll accept anyone in any location at levels between 1 and 5, resulting in ranges like "$85k" (lowest paid location, level 1) to "$250k" (highest paid location, level 5) - when they're (internally) looking for "level 3 or 4".
My hope is that the internal posting requirement will help with this, since internal postings are maybe more likely to be more specific about what level/location the team is looking for.
As an employer, I am reticent to name a salary range because the fact is that the return on investment of employees is not normally distributed; it follows a power law where the top people return many times the amount of an average person. This may be because of connections, experience, intelligence, or a mixture. When I recruit I always want to hire a top person for whom I'm happy to pay 50% more than an average person, but realistically that's not always possible for me. If I state a salary range then I have to extend it to the amount I'd be willing to play for a top person which would mean if I'd have to settle for an average person then I'd probably set their expectations too high.
My advice is that if you're worried about going through multiple rounds of interviews to get a low offer then the solution is just to be very clear of your expectations up front before you interview. The worst case is that I say I can't afford you. Candidates should know their value too and shouldn't be afraid of letting employers know what they're worth.
If the roles and expectations are actually thought through before posting, perhaps. If not, the first contact can gently nudge them towards the appropriate slot.
If an employer can't write a concrete job description that communicates the difference between junior and senior and staff/supersenior, that's on them. Get better at it before you waste the employee's time (or pay people for interviewing).
The interview process will determine if the candidate's skills are suitable for the position and if they are not, they don't get hired. If there is a more suitable position open, the company can offer to hire the candidate for the other position.
This would take double the time but also assumes that the same people are on the market during phase 1 and 2 which won't be true. In some cases I have s time constraint and just need the best available person. If they happen to be a top performer then do much the better.
> The worst case is that I say I can't afford you.
Actually, the worst case is that they employer lies and after 4 rounds of interviews and maybe take home assignments, the employer says "actually this job will be paying much less."
(this has happened to me once, it wastes everyones' time)
Yes, so why did they do it? I guess it depends on the type of job and company. In this case it sounds like they didn't have the budget or wisdom to hire a high performer but we're trying to net one through trickery. There will always be bad actors. A salary range wouldn't stop this as they could do the same by baiting you at the top of the range and switching to the lower end.
They were trying to rip me off by paying me less than I was earning at the time. The ceo of the company tried to sell me hard on why I shouldn't let the low offer hold me back and how the equity comp I was going to get would more than make for it. That was 4 years ago and the company is still not publicly traded.
You should always ask for your expected hourly rate for take home assignments. If they think it's too much, obviously they will low-ball you. And if they agree, at least it's not a total waste if they low-ball you anyway.
I completely agree. I would never ask someone to do work for free, but take homes are the best way of simulating actual job performance and can be enlightening for both sides.
Even if your argument is sound, as an employer, it is in your rational self-interest to oppose this regulation for all the _other_ unfair advantages it gives you. Thus your argument is already suspect because apparently, you're at a minimum non-committal about the unfair parts and want to hold on to this presumably more fair advantage, as well.
However, even the case you mention is unfair too. You're basically preserving your negotiation advantage to give you cheaper access to higher-performing talent.
Indeed, the very argument you make for candidates -- "just tell me your expectations" -- can be turned upon you -- "well, just tell me what you'd pay a top performer", and surprise, you don't want to, because it lessens your advantage.
This is exactly why this regulation exists -- no employer can justify the asymmetry in a candidate-positive way that holds water, so the government has to step in to correct the power imbalance.
Which other unfair advantages? Another way to look at this is that the employee is selling the employer a service. When you buy something from a shop do you expect to name your price, or do you expect see a price label? In that case the seller almost always names their price first. Do you like going into shops where their are no prices listed?
If you're unaware of how this issue negatively affects salaries for women and other minorities, I respectfully suggest you do a little more research on this topic. Here's a quick google hit, but there are many, many more resources: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220929-the-us-push-fo...
> Another way to look at this is that the employee is selling the employer a service.
Which would be a pretty ideological/libertarian way to present it. This isn't an auction; it's how people eat and put a roof over their head, and they have no choice but to play.
> The worst case is that I say I can't afford you.
There are many possible bad cases. Possibly much worse than this is that the candidate lowballs themselves. Another bad case is that they price themselves out when they might have been willing to take a lower offer after learning more.
The candidate has just as much uncertainty as the employer. There's no reason the burden should be on the candidate to be the first to name a number.
I don't say that the candidate has to be the first to name a number, just that they can. In fact, in most negotiations the results ends up closest to the first number named, so candidates should be happy to name the first number.
It doesn't make sense that top people return many times what the average does but you are only able to pay them 50% more. That kind of thinking is why salary ranges should be posted before top people waste their time applying.
I completely agree that it doesn't make sense, but that's how it is. Anyone who's ever hired a top performer will feel like they're getting the biggest bargain ever. I guess that psychology artificially limits the top of the range for salaries.
While I am supportive of this, I expect a lot (majority?) of listings with ranges like "$40k-200k based on experience". (Or the example from the article, "$17-50/hr")
NYC's Fact sheet about the new law notes that minimum and maximum stated salaries must be in "good faith". Not a lawyer, but maybe this is space for class action lawsuits or something...
A knowledge worker's productivity can easily (and provably ) range from -10x to +1000x.
So, it's much easier to prove in the court of law that the ranges are justified.
Dude who created the React Framework is always 100x valuable to the company than an average Javascript developer. A couple of brilliant dudes is all that is required for a company to be a mere $100 Million company vs $1 Billion company.
It's ridiculous to pay the same $100,000 for each of them
The dude who created the react framework (who I happen to know) already knows his worth, and is not getting jobs through public listings. This law isn't for him. Also he is getting higher level jobs.
And that's true even further down the line -- if your experience can mean $200K more per year, then those should be two different job listings. One senior and one junior.
This law applies to anyone in New York with no stated exceptions for outliers. If he ever works for a company/satellite office there, whether remote or on-site, he's as much a member of the job market as anyone else. Any company interested in hiring him would obviously provide a massive number at the higher range.
But they would never make a job listing for the job. They would just reach out to him and ask for an interview. Actually they would reach out and ask to have a discussion about what he wants to do next, and it would be a multi-month effort of convincing him to even apply, including informal meet and greets with the team. There would never be an open req.
And when hired he would be hire into the role that has the salary range he requires and possibly some larger than average performance based compensation scheme, which is totally legal, but also possibly not because at the point that you're hired as a principal or distinguished eng the default compensation is still really high.
> A knowledge worker's productivity can easily (and provably ) range from -10x to +1000x.
this is a variation of the 10x engineer BS meme. statistically this is not possible, and realistically you'll see the companies using that line of arguments for obfuscating salary information are also doing it to comply maliciously. In fact, using a far outlier case to justify your average base case is the definition of operating in bad faith.
Also, sure if you see an actual superstar nobody is stopping you from hiring him for a different role and paying him 10x or whatever. anecdotally speaking in my many years in silicon valley I have seen very few cases for such high performance engineers and you need a lot more than tech expertise to not just produce 10x more personally but also keep your team productive & all that is not easy to judge in an interview.
> I don't think I've ever met an engineer who is, by themselves, 1000x more productive than even the least productive person I've ever worked with
I guess that all comes down to how you measure it. I've worked with people who screw up the code base, suck time and productivity away from other team members, and require frequent management attention. So their productivity is negative or zero. Which makes me infinitely more productive than them.
I demand infinity dollars!
Just kidding of course, but the point is people aren't and can't be paid exactly mathematically proportionally to their productivity. About the best we can expect is for pay to be correlated with productivity. Or maybe monotonically increasing with productivity?
Yes you can easily make a lot of claims. But I don't think they stack up, hence my request to "prove" it.
Also, of course, if you compare me (L5 Swe) and Jeff (L11 senior Google fellow/SVP) or Sanjay, you'll find that the roles we are hired into have vastly different compensation ranges. So even presuming this is true, it actually goes against your overall point that wide ranges for a single posting are justified. I'm not being hired for the same work as Sanjay.
> Even though you are an L5, you'll never design an Android or a Spanner or a Dremel system or a Self-Driving System from scratch.
Correct, but neither Jeff nor Sanjay did any of those things, and no one did any of those things alone, or from scratch.
> SWEs who create Spanner Databases are 1000x more valuable to companies than someone who adds tiny features using a well-defined process and framework.
IDK, I'm pretty sure there's an automated tool that can create a spanner database for me, so I'm not sure why you think that's that impressive. Less snarkily, you're underestimating the amount of collaboration that happens, even with the impressive engineers. Tellingly, it's never the people extolled as 10 or 100x engineers who claim to be such, usually they echo my sentiments!
MapReduce is neither Spanner nor Dremel nor Android nor a Self-Driving system. I'm not sure what your point is.
And the paper you cite notes a number of other people in the acknowledgements who were critical both to refining the design, and to the infrastructure that MR was built atop, so even in the case of something that Jeff and Sanjay did do, they neither did it "alone", nor "from scratch", despite yes, being the two primary designers and developers of the initial implementation of MR.
If you have a point you're trying to make, make it explicitly.
Geez, I'm sorry dude, you are really clueless about 10x programming.
MapReduce was a revolutionary paper which allowed Google to scale using cheap hard-drives and compute instead of paying Oracle licenses. If you can't understand the impact of that paper during early days of Google to what it became, I'm flabbergasted by your L5 claim.
You are clearly a 1x, 9-5, LeetCode, TC chasing programmer and not Jeff.
I'll pay Jeff/Sanjay/Linus/Andy Rubin/Lewandosky 20x the salary I'd pay you. it's as simple as that
It's not particularly constructive to presume that someone who disagrees with you is "clueless". Just to reiterate, I think that it is absolutely true that some people have extremely high value in organizations. The obvious question is whether they have extremely high value above replacement. You've yet to present any so called "proof" of this.
> MapReduce was a revolutionary paper which allowed Google to scale using cheap hard-drives and compute instead of paying Oracle licenses. If you can't understand the impact of that paper during early days of Google to what it became
Sure. I do, however fail to see how this relates to whatever broader point you are trying to make, which still eludes me.
> You are clearly a 1x, 9-5, LeetCode, TC chasing programmer and not Jeff.
At least two of these are untrue, but yes, I'm proud to maintain work-life balance? I guess you got me.
Yeah, in the cases where they're like "looking for someone anywhere between college hire & sr engineer inclusive" it'd be nice if it was breaking it out by level/pay band, then people could have a much better idea if it was worth their time
Something like this is an extreme range (clearly no one in engineering would be at 40k) and would make the employer look quite bad IMO.
FWIW GitHub https://github.com/about/careers has eng salaries for US positions be like "min 110 max 250" and while the range is high, it's still more useful than no information at all IMO.
I wonder though how this would look like for non-tech jobs.
It's a red flag for me when the range from the company is too broad. It sounds like they don't know what they want.
If they truly need people of different levels of experience, it would make more sense for them to write separate job descriptions that accurately describe the responsibilities of the role.
In my experience, including at companies I've worked at, that's the case more often than not. Every department is perpetually short of employees, so the hope is to hire anyone halfway competent and figure out their real responsibilities later.
>If they truly need people of different levels of experience, it would make more sense for them to write separate job descriptions that accurately describe the responsibilities of the role.
They would do that if not for laws like this. Instead the JD is a legal checkbox, and you get the actual responsibilities after you apply.
This is still a good thing because you know the true limit. So instead of thinking "maybe I can get 60k for this job", you can think "maybe I can get 120k for this job".
I'm happy with an upper bound. I've been able to quickly disqualify a lot of recruiter messages simply by asking for comp ranges and discovering that max possible is less than my base, let alone RSUs and bonus.
Even with a larger range like you proposed it's easy to ask yourself where you are in that distribution. Even if your current comp is 190, a range 40-200 means it's only worth the time to interview if you really like the company and think the role might be a great fit. If you're making 60k currently then there's a reasonable chance you can get a high enough of a raise to make the move make sense.
I've seen salaries being rolled out and I have found this not to be the case.
In reality, most places have a salary in mind for a position, and most hr teams are not going to post '[that salary] - 100k more' and they're probably not going to post a lower end that's less than what they have in mind.
> The sweeping New York City rules will apply to almost all companies except for the smallest firms. Any business with at least four workers, assuming at least one of them is based in the city, must include the lowest and highest salaries for any job it posts.
...so, uh, question, because I'm getting increasingly confused about how jurisdiction works.
Let's say Houston passes a law which makes it illegal for companies to disclose salary ranges. I have no idea why Houston would do that, but stupider laws exist.
BigCorp has employees in both Houston and New York City. Heck, BigCorp probably has at least one job which requires alternating between NYC and Houston to meet with different teams. How does BigCorp avoid breaking the law?
It goes to federal court and the court makes a decision that states (or cities) cannot regulate each other and strikes down the laws requiring contradictory actions on entities which cross state boundaries. Too lazy to google references to similar decisions, I believe a landmark case involves shipping with either trucks or trains with states having conflicting requirements.
So, do you think this NYC law is likely to get cut back by the courts, or would it be incumbent on another municipality to pass a contradictory law first?
I am not a lawyer. I just like to speculate about what feels reasonable, with a remarkable 10% success rate or lower in legal rulings.
My thought is that it will be a Solomon split based on how the entities set up operation. If you have operations out of NYC and hire for operations to be based in NYC, then you'll be required to post (akin to Colorado today). There seems to be precedence for this with regards to taxation.
...given that a ruling can go one of two ways, either for or against the plaintiff, this is in fact a remarkable success rate. By choosing the opposite of whatever you predict, someone else could accurately predict the outcome of a case 90% of the time!
> Let's say Houston passes a law which makes it illegal for companies to disclose salary ranges.
This law would be struck down as a 1A violation.
But also I believe the description of the law is slightly wrong: jobs in nyc need postings, so positions in Houston wouldn't have them, but positions in NYC would.
> But also I believe the description of the law is slightly wrong: jobs in nyc need postings, so positions in Houston wouldn't have them, but positions in NYC would.
Ah, I reread the article and you're definitely right!
Does even that work? They're saying if the company has any jobs that could be performed in the NYC—even fully remote jobs—they have to post salary ranges for all jobs, as I understood it.
Colorado has a version of this, and so you'll sometimes see listings that specifically say they won't take Colorado applicants for that reason. So long as there are no current employees in NYC I would think the same could apply to this law.
We could test this pretty easily by getting a state to pass a privacy law that salaries cannot be disclosed, even indirectly.
In reality most tiny businesses wouldn't be affected, and most larger ones would just split into two legal entities closely allied, until finally someone like Google takes it to court, where the Interstate Commerce Clause would actually be used for regulating interstate commerce.
Before that, however, the states would probably work to negotiate something so they don't get slapped federally.
There was a ton of push-back online when that law went into effect despite CA having a similar law already on the books and obviously other dominoes (like NYC) getting ready to fall.
It was fantastic in my last job search. Even recruiters that tried to "not talk numbers" until the end of the process I could just point to the relevant laws or just not continue on in the process. Plenty of companies were playing by the rules so no need to waste my time.
The CA law on the books was that they had to answer a question about salary bands during an interview, but not in the job posting itself. CA only recently passed a law requiring salary in the job posting itself which I think goes live on Jan 1.
I don't understand why they do this, but I guess it must work from time to time. Seems like a lot of effort to do the whole interview process and then try to get them to accept your lowball offer.
Can you please expand on this a bit more? I live in Colorado and saw virtually no change when looking for a new job inside and outside of the state last year. I did run across a few "no job applications from CO" as was mentioned in other comment threads, but most job postings I saw did not post salary information.
The place I’m applying simply lists: “Software Development (all levels)” and is an open call for engineers. Salary obviously will depend on experience and interview performance. I don’t see why that’s an issue, a corporatized version of this where each company has to split their postings into 8 different categories or risk excluding complete novices/interns that might join for near free or heavy hitters that would need big cash but provide significant return… doesn’t seem better in any way.
> split their postings into 8 different categories or risk excluding complete novices/interns that might join for near free
I've been helping a friend who's just out of school and going through the interview ringer. They've already gone through one round of interviews for a posting like that only to be told after 2 interviews (for an internship) "by all experience levels we actually meant a minimum of 2 years industry experience for the lowest level". So now she completely avoids anything that is phrased this way.
I hope you can help your friend learn to be more stubborn against failure. I wish I knew what a good training technique might be: I have friends that need help with the same issue (both male and female).
Sadly the best training technique is to just keep trying, time and time again. If you have difficulty interviewing, you should interview even when you have a job, just to get more practice.
The first time you're turned down it hurts a lot, especially if it was a job you really were interested in - the fiftieth? Not so much.
The last startup I worked at ranged developers from 100k to 150k on paper but “senior devs” landed at around 125, while the current startup I work at didn’t list numbers but puts senior devs at around $200k plus generous bonuses.
Where you land always depends on performance and experience, sure, but knowing both ends of the range for any given title is still critically important to making a decision (and negotiating). If someone comes from a below-market rate company, they may not know what to even ask for or negotiate around because important information is obscured from them, and they’ll end up short-changing themselves.
For finance and tech jobs the compensation will be tied up in performance bonuses and equity, so salary ranges aren't the most meaningful for these roles, except when there is no non-salary pay.
For tech jobs I'd wager the vast majority operate on a simple salary plus retirement set up. HN is definitely in a bubble where seemingly everyone works at the top tech companies and gets like 175k base + 90k in bonuses and equity.
This would probably drive increased base compensation and decreased variable compensation in order to stand out on job boards. I’m among the people who would like that !
I genuinely wonder how this would work for non-cash portions of the total comp.
Would they have to declare the dollar value of the shares issued? What about non-public companies that offer a significant chunk of the comp in illiquid stock options?Would they have to be included as a part of the salary range?
Disclaimer: I am neither opposed nor in support of this. I don't mind taking that route and seeing how it works out. I see the potential downsides and upsides, and neither seem to be extremely impactful. So it feels like there is little harm in testing it out, even if it ends up being a nothingburger.
If that's truly the case, then it is gonna be a complete nothingburger for most devs. Same for finance, where a large (and, a lot of times, the largest) chunk of the total comp is in the annual bonus.
In that case, I don't understand the celebrations and arguments people keep having about how it is gonna affect "big tech". I guess it might end up being good for non-tech/only-cash-comped employees, so we will see.
> If that's truly the case, then it is gonna be a complete nothingburger for most devs.
Maybe. It might also let devs pre-filter companies that are salary heavy or salary light. Some companies let you choose how much compensation is equity vs. cash, but most don't.
If you have dependents or other standards of living, certain cash can be king over variable equity or potential bonuses.
I have a hard time believing this will meaningfully help workers. It's a way for large companies to crush smaller competitors who offer anything other than base salary. Small co that offers more flexibility in location / hours? You will get filtered out because adding a salary filter is the easiest thing possible. Getting someone to read the JD that explains why working for you makes sense is hard.
Smaller companies have always had to compete on non-salary benefits like flexibility, and jobseekers who actually value those things above a higher salary will presumably be motivated to look into them, as they have always done as well. It's still helpful to know if your actual paycheck is going to be in range of your expectations or not before you waste your time applying to jobs.
From a recruiter perspective, this will accomplish very little, outside of the firms trying to pay the least. They will still get around it.
Take this example, which happens multiple times per day. Junior candidate applies to senior job. Thinks cause they are senior at X company, that means they are at Y. False. Every company has diff leveling and definition on what that means. Companies give away senior titles like candy. Go look at how many "engineers" with 2-3 years of experience are senior at a number of companies. How is giving away those titles good faith? Really? Is anyone SENIOR after that little on the job? I sure hope not.
Anyway, back to my example. They still consider the candidate, but at a lower level. Salary on job posting doesn't match the candidates expectations. This is why its the recruiter AND the candidates responsibility to get within the ball park on the initial phone conversation. Its still difficult for the recruiter to confirm with the candidate that they'll get the range they want. Usually they need to be interviewed and have their skills/ability assessed first.
I'm not so much frustrated by a lack of salary ranges in ads as I am about two things:
1. Waiting to figure out salary until the final interview.
2. No mention of CoL adjustments.
I don't know what employers expect to gain. Cynically people think that it's because employees are terrible negotiators. Maybe that's true. I always ask the top of the salary range based on other salary postings and let them explain to me why they have to work me down. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it's a CoL adjustment or other non-sense and I don't complete the paperwork.
I'm not convinced that posting salary ranges will make pay more balanced. It's nice to see but I think what people want is a hard number - you will definitely make $X if you work here. Unfortunately, it's typically not that simple. At my company we have pay bands by seniority, and pay bands inside those pay bands (to provide for raises, etc - merit pay).
This system works. What people should be doing in my opinion is talking about their salary. Force your employers to justify salaries. This is how I got a raise after I figured out I was paid 20k less than the new guy.
However, I'm not sure people are ready to hear "you're bottom barrel" to a response on why your salary is at the lowest band. Unfortunately, humans are creatures that compare and you won't be able to guilt your employer into paying you more if you are actually just simply bad at your job. I think discussing salaries openly will help the merit worthy engineers get what they should be getting. It will, necessarily, cause a LOT of hurt feelings however because a lot more people think they are more merit-worthy than they are. Whether it's worth it to protect people's delicate sensibilities can only be figured out by doing it. Discuss your salaries!
I think every salary transparency law I've seen (including this one) only includes base salary, and not bonus, stock, etc. Realistically the laws probably cover 90+% of available jobs by only requiring base salary/hourly rate.
I don’t understand the obsession with ranges, shouldn’t posting a minimum be sufficient? Posting a minimum allows job seekers to rule out roles that can’t pay their bills/expenses without putting a ceiling on how high a job seeker can negotiate.
One common method for low-bailing is telling a prospective employee that what he or she asks is way above the rest of the team/peers and it would be "fair" if he or she accepts e.g. 20% less.
I actually think this benefits the employers. I rarely apply for jobs that don't post a salary range just because it's not worth the hassle of trying to figure out what they will pay.
this wont impact tech jobs as much, because there is some transparency, but I can imagine it will bring transparency to all other non-tech jobs, like Sales, HR, Marketing, Operations, etc.
These laws are a great idea, but I really wish they would require that the bottom and top of the range be within X% of each other, were X is like 20 or 30 or even 50 or 100. But no more than the top being double the bottom.
If the range is bigger than that, it sounds like you have two different jobs, a junior and senior, or senior and principle, etc.
It would at least force them to be slightly more transparent about what they're actually looking for.
Low - Mid - High range isn't uncommon, it's just not as common to see it on a job-listing. Generally you expect someone who is solid in their level to have a compa ratio of 100%, which puts you near the mid part of the band. When you are newer to the level, you would be aligned closer to the low end of the band, and as you progress and near a promotion, you would be edging towards the higher end.
There were a lot of WFH job postings from the past few years that said "No applicants from Colorado" because of their similar law.
CA and a few other states have recently enacted this same law though so it'll become a lot harder to avoid posting the salary if you want good candidates.
I haven't seen those postings, but I imagine that would make a terrible first impression to potential candidates, effectively signalling that the company is committed to playing games with salaries.
Reminder that if that's the case the company cannot have any employees in that state. Otherwise they have to have a real reason for limiting the geography i.e. the position isn't remote.
Would you apply to a company that posted a job that said "not open to Colorado residents" just so they could avoid posting a salary range? I sure as shit wouldn't.
I remember seeing this ad for a (direct) sales position. The headline was something like: “Do you want to earn up to $150000 a year?” and then a bit down with the caveat that the position was 100% commission based, with salaries ranging between $10k-$150k/year.
This will make it a lot easier to gather financial data on individuals and target ads to people who make $x. If the job and salary are posted, it will be scraped, and compared to job titles in profiles at places like LinkedIn.
Because one of the main issues with negotiation is that people have different idea on what's a good salary depending on their educational and cultural background, the environment they grew up in, etc.
For example a company might be willing to pay up to $175k for a certain dev position. This amount of money seems completely crazy to a developer who comes from a poor family and is the first one to have a skill that can pay so much. It will never occur to them to attempt to negotiate for this amount, because even $90k seems like a great salary compared to what their parents had. $175k would seem unreal, especially in a country where talking about money is taboo.
But if this number can be seen often in ads as an upper range, it becomes normalized in the eyes of everyone who is applying for jobs, no matter their educational and cultural background.
I am concerned that some employers might try some creative work-arounds to this law, like ranges that are way too wide so they can have some flexibility in making lower offers.
I don't know the legality of doing something like this is but as a worker in NY I just wouldn't apply. Going forward I'll likely only apply to a position where the low end is an acceptable amount and if I can get more that's great. How realistic this will be I have no idea.
If a company offers a very low lower bound like $10k, job seekers won’t apply there and will go to competitors with a more reasonable lower bound.
Similarly, when a highly qualified applicant gets an offer way below the upper bound they’ll be upset and ask “why don’t I get paid near the top of your band?”
Unless all employers work together to make the bands useless, it’ll at least give some visibility into what employers are worth targeting as an applicant.
My employer has Colorado jobs and gives some wide ranges (ex: 130-300k) and more narrow ranges (ex: 200-240k). The wide ones probably cover 3-4 levels and the narrow ones are for a specific level. They’re all missing RSUs or bonuses, but they should give you a rough idea if it’s worth applying or starting a discussion with a recruiter/hiring manager.
After reading the Road to Serfdom - this gov mandate feels like it trends toward communism, not a free-market meritocracy. The next thing you know the gov will start assigning $ranges to positions, and qualifications for those positions.
That seems like a big leap but I'll bite. How do you see a connection between "Let people know what salary they're in the running for" and "You must not pay more than XYZ for this job"?
I get that it is possible but I'd be interested if you have reasons for believing it is a real risk beyond a slim chance.
I've known for a long time it drives people nuts that job ads don't have salary, or have a wide salary range.
The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone. Until they have met them, assessed them, heard what they salary target is and weighed it up against their skills and experience and calibrated it against the team.
The conversation almost always goes like this: Employers come to me and say "we want a great senior C# .NET developer". I say "what do you want to pay?". They say "don't know, we just want someone great, what do you think we need to pay to get the right person?". I say "I think it will be about $X, but lets put a job ad up and indicate it's top of range $ and see who we get."
It is also true that a single job ad might be aiming to employ a number of people at various positions of seniority and experience.
Government agencies are required to carefully define salary ranges because that is the way they work. So it does not surprise me that governments would legislate to require job ads to do the same - essentially because of ignorance about how the world works.
If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.
It's that easy - if the ad doesn't specify salary and that is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't apply.
Being angry about it or feeling that employers/recruiters are playing some sort of manipulative game is ignoring the reality set out above. And when you come into a position that requires recruiting, likely you'll speak to your recruiter and say "what do you think we'll need to pay for someone like this?".
Far more important is to know the salary target that you are aiming for.
EDIT: lots of unhappy responses to this, but don't shoot the messenger. Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works.