Ask HN: Why doesn't YC list compensation for their own open positions?
HN, being a rather progressive forum, tends to trend in support of including compensation details for job posts, open positions, recruiter reach-outs, etc. This position [1] was just posted today and has been on the front page all day. Does anyone have any insider information or generally good theory as to why YC's own job posts include none of that information?
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/y-combinator/jobs/1x2B...
357 comments
[ 2294 ms ] story [ 6625 ms ] threadA 0.01% share of YC is still worth a lot. And I’m assuming that all YC positions come with a share of equity.
Even if they didn’t, you get to help shape the admissions process. Which means you get the opportunity to participate in investment decisions for the startups that will in ten years be worth billions.
EDIT: Do people feel this is mistaken? I’d be happy to source the claims.
Let’s put it this way. If you do well as a YC admissions engineer, and you dedicate the next ten years to growing YC, what are the chances you’ll walk with less than a 0.01% share? It wouldn’t make sense for YC not to offer that. Your work will help make or break YC’s core investment decisions.
And ten years is just the maximum theoretical upper bound that I can think of — e.g. the initial role doesn’t include equity, and then you ask for equity a few years later. (That scenario seems far more implausible than them just including equity vesting in the offer. Yet even in that case, you’d still end up with your 0.01%.)
Here’s something closer to a proof: YC is a startup. Startup jobs come with equity compensation. YC’s portfolio is approaching $1T (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064559). 1% of $1T is $10B. And 0.01% of $10B is $1M.
That’s the lower bound. YC likely has a higher stake than 1%, especially when you consider the Continuity Fund. And they’ll likely be granting more than 0.01% to a product engineer on the admissions team that can provably grow YC’s portfolio over ten years.
So the absolute lower bound is around $1M over ten years from equity alone. It’s hard to estimate the upper bound — exponential investments are counterintuitive — but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was around $10M, and I wouldn’t rule out $40M. After all, $10M over 10 years is $1m a year, and top engineers at top tech companies make ~$600k in total comp. so $10M is just keeping pace with Google, and $40M is keeping pace with YC’s tremendous growth.
If YC stops considering themselves a startup in 50 years, pg will be turning in his grave. It would mean there’s room for a competitor to dethrone YC, just like any other big company.
And startup jobs come with equity. That’s one of the biggest incentives to work for a startup. Otherwise the smart, capable hackers would quietly focus on getting a top job at Google.
All else being equal, there’s no reason to work as hard as you can for $10M when you can get it by coasting for two decades at a big company. And YC staff works hard.
As much as “exposure” is worthless, having worked for YC is worth more than a few hundred grand. I’d work for YC as an engineer below market rate.
Minimum Qualification: 100,000 karma
Compensation: $Karma value yearly
Remote work option available
Contact @dang if interested.
/s
Smaller companies should have narrower bans because they lack the organization capacity to reap the cost savings of hiring cheaper lower-tear workers, and also the cash flow to pay exceptionally higher-tier ones. (I assume the VCs will not be pleased if you say "but they're a 10x engineer!".)
Plenty of companies decided to stop hiring from Colorado rather than post compensation in the job postings.
If I had to guess, I suspect it provides no competitive advantage to list compensation except if you pay top tier.
As an anecdote from a friend, the wage differences can be substantial. The friend just recently got a new job and the senior who mentored him in onboarding also got promoted a level too. That senior was talking about how they finally reached six figures (Canada has much lower pay than the USA, so this isn't crazy). My friend made six figures starting, with 3-5 fewer years of experience and just about two years overall.
There are a lot of absurdly underpaid people out there.
In my observation, this is literally the backbone of capitalism
We have the internet. We have laws protecting employees discussing their pay. There is nothing in capitalism stopping anyone from disclosing their pay and creating a transparent market.
And it is happening, albeit slowly (see levels.fyi and glassdoor). CO’s transparency laws also help, and anything to help transparency will assist. The main resistance I sense is actually from people themselves, for various social and emotional reasons.
1. They ask for a raise and don’t get it. You lose a team member when they leave.
2. You can’t get a raise because your boss is forced to give your colleague a raise and doesn’t want to have to hand out raises.
3. Your colleague stews and resents you. People say it won’t happen, but I have heard a ton of complaining about how X earns so much and they don’t deserve it from co-workers.
That is what I meant by my last sentence.
The mood around those who were already above their band went from "yeah they're okay devs" to "wtf, those guys aren't nearly good enough" pretty quickly.
I'm just happy to be one of those that got a good raise to meet the bottom of my payband and not the other way around.
Yes and that should be a lesson to pay the whole team more.
> 2. You can’t get a raise because your boss is forced to give your colleague a raise and doesn’t want to have to hand out raises.
Your colleague wasn't paid well, asked to get paid better, and got it.
Now you're said because you can't continue to get paid more relative to your colleague? Lose your greed and grow some empathy in its place.
> 3. Your colleague stews and resents you. People say it won’t happen, but I have heard a ton of complaining about how X earns so much and they don’t deserve it from co-workers.
Then work with them to explain how and why you deserve more than your colleagues. Otherwise, they might be right about you not deserving it. You getting what you don't deserve means, by your own logic, that they're not getting what they do deserve.
#3 results from a fundamental confusion people have that pay is based on people "deserving" something. Like it's an expression of virtue or your worth as a person or a reward for doing something good.
It's not. You're paid based on supply and demand and your negotiating skills, nothing more. It's not a golden star from your teacher that you're a nice boy. It's whatever you were able to convince the company the monetary value of your contribution is worth. That's all. Get over whether someone deserves this or that. I'll solve this once and for all: nobody deserves anything. You're responsible for figuring out how to provide value and capture it.
What's unfortunate is that people aren't willing to see the change go downward ever and then also argue that others can't go upward because... well then you yourself "can't" go upward.
What's deserved is for people to be compensated fairly. If the company is compensating someone unfairly and can't compensate someone fairly because of then, then that is a definite and clear problem.
Whatever your definition of fair is, whether that's "deserving" or "market forces", it's still the same argument.
Well there's 2 major theories of thought about that.
One is that the holders of the capital decide how much to pay, and they make the bulk of the market. You get paid what you negotiate.
The other is that the worker will never be paid what they are worth. In other words, their surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.
And in this country, we're seeing the beginning of the second with Antiwork and the Great Resignation. Many of us Zennials are really tired.
If you were theoretically willing to pay $5 for a gallon of milk and you walked into a store and they were selling it for $2, I'm sure you wouldn't insist they take the extra money. It's the store's job to figure out how much to charge for milk. It's your job to figure out how much you're willing to charge for your labor.
You could argue there's an important caveat of symmetric information around this interaction if you want to talk about fairness. Asymmetric information is frequently considered an unfair advantage (see insider trading) but is also recognized as the source of much profit (see auction winner's fallacy), but you have to at least recognize that employers by and large have a huge information advantage in the labor market currently.
It's true that employers are privy to a lot more salary information than employees. I know I said what other people are paid is irrelevant, which I think it is in terms of fairness, but you should be (and, legally at least, in the US, are) free to take that information into account when deciding what you'll accept. It's still up to you to make that decision and hold employers to it. They aren't going to offer up higher salaries out of the kindness of their heart or some sentimentality about fairness.
Unfortunately that's not quite true. Milk (and other foodstuffs) are a requirement to live. People are "willing" to pay more for that because they don't really have many other options. So it's ripe for abuse.
Salary negotiations are not fraud. Fraud involves being promised something and not getting what you agree to.
If someone says they’ll give you X in exchange for Y and then they do exactly that, that isn’t fraud.
I’m not sure you understand what the word fraud means.
Your ability to negotiate your own salary is pretty orthogonal to your ability to do most jobs. Some jobs definitely require the ability to negotiate in the form of compromise, but rarer are the positions where the brinksman-style of salary negotiation (where you credibly would scuttle the entire deal) would be useful. It should be pretty easy to figure out within a year how a new hire compares to the existing employees and were they _should_ be on the salary totem and set them on the proper trajectory from there.
There would certainly be other knock-on effects from true salary transparency, but bias towards salary negotiating skill is much closer to bias towards people-who-look-like-me than it is to bias towards people-who-generate-value-for-the-business.
With close to perfect information, there is little room to profit, which would put a spoke in the wheel of capitalism.
Bigger potential profits merit bigger risk taking. But not all investments have the same risk profile and time horizons.
Even then, there is no perfect information on clients.
If I create value by hitting in a nail with your hammer I deserve compensation for my labor, but certainly you deserve compensation for the part your hammer played as well.
Wages are simply returns to labor, profits are returns to capital.
Rather, what you're calling for is average value produced, which is substantially different. I'm not sure I accept the assertion that they are close.
Obviously, employers are not going to operate a business at zero profit margin, so I am not sure what the significance of pointing out that employees do not get paid the sum total of their economic contribution to a business’s profits (which I imagine is rarely ever calculable).
The whole point of having buyers and sellers engage in numerous, transparent transactions is to figure out what portion of the business’s operations should be allocated to the purchasing of labor, since there is no objective way to measure it and have a definitive answer. It is always moving, and needs to be continuously updated. The same reason employees always need to be shopping around and seeing who will offer them the appropriate price for their labor.
Is that actually true? Is it possible to verifiably disclose one’s pay? Are you supposed to sign an affidavit or something?
Obviously, they can be falsified, but I presume we are not talking about that. There is also the Norway method of having the government provide it.
You win award for understatement[1] of 2021.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
Do you know if there's any data supporting this?
"this role can be performed from any US state except Colorado." Sometimes Hawaii is included.
Let me try and dig up a few of these.
Does this account for the vastly different levels of output from employees? I would have to imagine nobody believes quality of work and productivity are actually equal amongst coworkers.
The peer pay differences are less pronounced in other fields, but why would we assume people are "essentially the same" at their output? I have definitely seen full stack developers that are "doing the same job" 3x-5x better than some of their peers in many cases, when you compound quality and efficiency. Not every company has enough people for tiered job rating buckets like Google, Amazon etc.
https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=9e046a56c76ba933&tk=1fo21m...
https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=d87c517c32a680d3&fccid=2b2d...
https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=0e1dbdaee064b39b&fccid=c953...
https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=b1ed6d586890504b&fccid=afbf...
https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=cd34c725a1fc5766&fccid=2c62...
The 5th link says it openly in the title of the job ad.
> Principal Software Engineer – Search (open to remote work, except in Colorado)
Just search "software engineer Colorado" on Indeed, select "Remote" and maybe 1/3 of them are a Colorado exclusion.
> https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=08cf978f51852f65&fccid=ccf1...
Of tech companies doing it, one of them is eBay.
The first thing I do at the start of every interview conversation is ask comp. I then tell them my total comp and ask for X% over. If equity is discussed, I always require my same base pay or slightly higher.
The reality is that ensures a continued trajectory upward. I also always request 2-4x any equity I’m offered. If they want to keep me, they need to make it worth my while at a higher risk profile (equity isn’t cash on hand).
Equity is always a gamble, for the company and the employee. I personally demand higher because plenty of my work is open source and I offer more references as well. That mitigates the company risk and in return I demand more equity (as I’m reducing said companies risk).
> If you underestimate what they’re willing to pay, you’re leaving money on the table. If the real answer is that they would compensate someone like you up to $75,000 dollars, and you guess they would pay a salary of only $65,000, you very literally may have just cost yourself $10,000. [0]
[0] https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/salary-expectations-in...
And a video from the creator of that site (Josh Doody) on this specific issue (disclosing current salary):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N7mOR9yv2U
The goal can be to reach a mutually agreeable solution as quickly as possible. In this case, saying “this is what I’ll agree to” up front works towards that goal even if it does leave some meat on the bone.
with that in mind, and the following rule is a basic negociation principle: Information gives an edge.
So if you put down your expectation, or worse provide your current compensation, you are giving away critical information to let the other side know pretty much all you know, which one can roughly derive what you would accept or reject. and the other side will either not give an offer at all (if your expectations are way off higher than budget) or will offer the minimum to get away with.
tldr: trusting potential opponents by telling them what they kindly ask is naive.
For context: I realize that one-off negotiations (buying a car at a dealership) are strictly adversarial, but negotiations in ongoing relationships (employment) benefit more from sharing information on what you want and why.
For example, you tell the other side that you need 10K extra for planned babysitting expenses and they offer you less, but add paid time off to care for your own child.
But you should ask the recruiter about the salary range and do research on the company before hand to find out what the range is.
If you're generally aware of what companies in the market are paying, quickly filtering out those that pay below what you want (for example, by saying "I'm looking for a total compensation above $500,000, and I know that there are companies in the market that will compensate at this level") is likely to save you time.
I’ve been burned too many times waiting. Not worth it to get to the end only to be 50% over what they can pay.
First, no good team will hire someone that does this, second, this is not a good negotiation tactic at all.
On the former: definitely it's prudent for both sides to be 'in range' or else it's all pointless, but that should be sorted out before the interview process - just the range.
Anyone wanting to talk about salaries up front is not going to make it past that part of the conversation for any decent group. It's the last part, not the first part, for so many reasons not the least of which is trying to put a number on something wherein fit, value etc. has not been established, and more obviously a concern over motivations etc..
As for the later, i.e. 'why it's a bad negotiating tactic' ... because it's not just about Supply, it's about Demand as well.
You may be overstating or understating your position by quite a lot thereby rending moot a real opportunity for exchange of value.
You may have some kind of special skills they really need, and some advanced insight. They might also be in a very profitable position. They might be happy to pay you much more. Alternatively, you may have little to offer, they might be cash constrained etc..
For equity again, they might be offering you a sweet deal, above industry norms, in which case asking for 2-4x just seems aggressive or uninformed.
But really, both of those things combined are bad: anyone wanting to talk comp details before demonstrating value, commitment, professionalism and the incidentals like curiosity/intelligence ... as an employee that's 'really bad signal'. If you're hiring someone you know to be a competent contractor, the scope of the job is established - fine - but that's rarely the case.
YC doesn't publish comp because it's probably not very helpful, the range would have to be wide, and they probably want people who want to be there, the comp distracts a bit from that. That said, I wonder if there were a sea change on that custom if would all be better off.
This is why I'm happy to go through third party recruiters. It's in their own interest to not waste time with people who either can't be placed or need a certain pay range, so you can ask them in the first minute of conversation what the job pays and they'll tell you. Plus they'll know the salary of many many people, as their own compensation depends on it.
I think most people on HN are naïve as to how most companies outside of tech startups actually work. They have concrete pay scales, you get the bare minimum of that pay scale when you hire in, anything above that is from your annual merit based increase which is often at or below inflation. You can look at your co-workers and have a very good idea of what they make to the percent based on how long they've been in their role.
Jobs posted on remote job forums like weworkremote.com and remoteok.com routinely list salary ranges.
Not accusing you (or anyone) of this, but just a general observation- a lot of these 'companies should have salary ranges' discussions seem to come uncomfortably close to an old-school union or government employee system of 'if you have x years, you're at x level'. I think we should celebrate individual accomplishment- some engineers with 4 years of experience are just better & worth more than some engineers with 10 years, and that's OK. My point is- most companies are hiring at multiple levels, and we can't know what level you're at until we interview you. So we can say Software Engineer 1 makes this, Engineer 2 makes that, etc.- but we don't know where you're going to end up
The seniority thing misguided. People should be paid based on the value that is a product of that role. Maybe their seniority qualifies then for a better role. That's fine, then post a different job description for the other role.
I think it is in large part way to underpay people earlier in life and overpay them later in order to incentive them differently. It also is a rough cudgel to match family vs single difference in needs.
It should be this easy for a company or recruiter:
- SDE 1 makes $X-Y
- SDE 2 makes $Y-Z
- SDE 3 makes $Z-A
- Sr Software Engineer makes $A-B
- Principal Engineer makes $B-C
For someone of your experience we'd typically be looking at an SDE 2 or SDE 3 role, but that can change as we move through the interview process. We'll let you know as we move through the process if we decide to change the level that we're evaluating you for.
--
Just, like, be transparent and honest with candidates. It's really really not hard.
It wouldn’t be all that helpful to break the job listing down into 3-6 different job listings if the end result is a wide or open-ended range anyway.
I have personally seen people with literally no domain relevant experience (they’d worked in retail & service businesses) say that they expect to be in the top half of the salary range of a mid-level engineering role posting.
I disagree. I'd say that you don't know what kind of person you have until they've put in a few months of work.
At one of the earlier startups I was involved with I had worked closely with another developer. When said startup fell apart and the group of us all went our different ways, I got a warning from another colleague about the individual I had grown close with, we will just note them as "E".
She had cautioned that when things were good (and the usually were) "E" was a great individual. However, the moment things did not go 100% perfectly, or there was any type of "advantage" to gain regardless of the cost, they would immediately do that and backstab anyone. I wrote that off as just a disagreement between the two of them, something grudge or who knows.
It took many years later that "E" made his true nature shown. I truly believe it to be a combination of being locked down for COVID, constant job hunting, the fact he had "quit" learning in tech, a weird fascination with crypto currency, getting lost into a hole of IDPOL (us versus them, with us or against us nonsense), and some closet fascism to boot. Not to mention attacking myself and others for "being educated" because the few of us Engineers held specialized degrees and long work histories, whereas "E" was nothing more than a basic bootcamp grad.
All it took was myself not fully agreeing on a trivial point in a matter, and in moments "E" had attempted to turn everything I had privately confided in him in an attempt to hurt me. Of course all that did was confirm the warning of him being what he was, and his opportunist ways.
So even then, people can surprise you.
> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is why you now see businesses advertising pay such as “up to $x per hour”. It is because those businesses have lost a little negotiating power due to shifts in labor supply.
Personally, I am waiting for signs that say “starting at $x”. That will really mean labor’s negotiating position has improved.
There isn't any particular connection between how YC hires for its teams internally and what the HN community thinks or feels about such things. Both are perfectly valid questions, but they're unrelated.
> Does anyone have any insider information or generally good theory as to why YC's own job posts include none of that information?
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
>You may quote the guidelines in an attempt to scold other users, but be advised that it's something only losers do.
If the market is competitive, then the employer listing a subpar minimum pay will either get subpar candidates or be forced to raise it to compete with their competitors.
These mechanisms are not expected to work over the course of months or even a year. It can take multiple years for the supply curves to move.
(To be clear, that is saying it would be better if raising the minimum wage did increase unemployment, because that would likely indicate the labor market wasn't completely fucked in employees favor to begin with. We simply wouldn't have a minimum wage in that case because there would be enough organic worker power.)
Still, I rather have the transparency. Wide bands for all jobs makes it plainly obvious who holds the power, and that is still useful. Do not want my coworkers to be blissfully ignorant.)
E.g. GitLab, a 100% remote company with 1,400+ employees pays local rates, and here’s why: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...
An engineer that started on-site with regional pay that now went remote does not equal “we’re a company that hires remote worldwide and we don’t adjust to regional salaries”.
A good example would be a company that hires new staff in multiple countries and continents that pays everyone regardless of their location.
So in practice, yes, but companies aren’t so deliberate about it as to have it in policy.
Depending on the company sometimes the differences in base salary will be very minimal, say $225k in Ohio versus $250k in SF.
Common misconception but it’s not how markets work.
You pay whatever it takes to get candidates onboard, but you ideally don’t pay more than necessary. You definitely don’t pay everyone more just because one of your employees lives in SF.
This is more intuitive if you think of any other market you might personally operate in. Would you expect your local car mechanic to charge you twice as much as the other local shops just because they also have a location in San Francisco? No, you’d just go to the next mechanic who charged local rates. You aren’t interested in paying more than necessary and neither is your employer. It’s not nefarious, it’s just rational acting.
Basically: most tech companies don’t adjust the price of their product for the region they are selling it in, but adjust the salary of the people making the product based on the region they live in.
Correct, but you’re forgetting that labor is also one of the product/service costs for a company. They treat it like a market, just as you would if you were hiring someone to work on your car or house.
It’s called the labor market because it’s literally a market. Expecting companies to completely disregard the market aspect and just pay the maximum amount for everyone regardless of their actual cost is wishful thinking.
Some might say there's a power dynamic, and it's just an excuse used by a candidate to negotiate higher - but at the end of the day that is what I heard every single time, without fail, when someone wanted to negotiate their salary.
If that's the case, then it does definitely indicate to me that "where you live" is a variable, and an especially important variable.
As do I. The value of my labor doesn't change because I walked 5 blocks away into another ZIP code with significantly higher/lower costs of living.
The only reason this flies is because most engineers have little to no ability to individually negotiate away such nonsense, while employers are happy to collude with one another to enforce these pay scales.
But guess what, you can still pay the person in Vietnam or India or Belarus or Oman a very strong regional wage and free up cash allowing you to offer a competitive VHCOL salary. There's no realistic reason to pay someone in eastern Europe $400k TC.
If you can't tie your actions directly to cost savings or revenue increases you're just blowing smoke up your manager's ass about value created anyway. It's all hand-wavey negotiation and negotiation is almost entirely based around leverage.
Salaries aren’t high in the bay because houses are expensive. Houses are expensive because salaries are high. There happens to be a concentration of talented and highly compensated people there. That doesn’t mean they will settle for less elsewhere.
In my experience with working with foreign developers, specifically those in eastern Europe, real talent can easily command SF-level compensation from companies that pay SF-level compensation in the US. Employers often get what they pay for when they think that outsourcing means that they'll get equivalent quality work, just with lower costs.
IMO these acronyms have reached the point where they don't really serve a purpose.
“Can’t hire as many people”, “they would stay for the money even if they weren’t happy”.
Obviously this isn’t just about profit but about employee happiness guys.
Location-dependent pay could go side-by-side with wealth-dependent pay. You already have a trust-fund and no college-debt? You only get half what others are making for the same work.
Suppose the average wage somewhere is $10K/year, and you hire a developer at $100K/year there. I would argue that it might be more beneficial in aggregate both to the remote community and to your company to hire two developers at $50K/year from the same place (assuming those are market clearing prices), both because of the effect on the remote consumption (the two people will consume more than one most likely), and the fact that you're spreading out the economic opportunity in the remote area that you are hiring in (now there are two developers who are well paid relative to the median versus only one - and it's also more likely to spur further investment into development in general).
I even posted about it once and got a ton of upvotes but then the mods buried my post.
I would love to see more job posts with compensation in fairness to people who aren't good at negotiating, but it just isn't the norm these days.
I have felt this approach to be a good one overall for our org (currently 75 people).
In many ways, it is simpler. We don't have the distraction/time wasted of having these negotiations and lack of compensation clarity during hiring nor do we have staff making wildly different salaries and having resentment internally.
We set a high bar on performance and our definition of 'Senior' is likely more in line with a 'Lead' in the marketplace (which is a discussion all its own).
I find that a lot of candidates really appreciate our jobs posts due to its clarity.
While there are many candidates that apply that are under qualified, I feel this would be the case either way.
Often times, we find really good people who are being underpaid currently for their value. If we end up paying them much more than what they would've taken, it really doesn't bother me. My aim is not to optimize for this salary tuning, my aim to find people who would be a great fit for us, will provide a lot of value to the business, and will want to stay and grow.
Some may say we are leaving money on the table, where in my opinion, at our size, I feel it is the opposite.
I'm proud to say we have amazing retention here, which is such an enormous advantage when you have a good team, particularly in engineering, which I feel other orgs often overlook. Keeping our staff happy (compensation is only a piece of that), they stay here year upon year providing more value to a growing business. This is well worth it vs playing these compensation games where it can contribute more to this revolving door approach and the huge time + energy suck spent in hiring, onboarding and opportunity cost for the business.
If a company is flexible on compensation then it doesn’t make sense to artificially constrain the job listing before they even know what candidates are applying and how much they need to join.
Source: Previously a hiring manager at early startups.
Example:
Job: Software Engineer
Description: Lorem ipsum
Range of 125K-300K based on relevant experience level
New Grad / 1YOE: 125-150K
2-5 YOE: 150K-200K
5+ YOE: 200K-300K
You can of course be as specific or vague, but these guides help inform people on both ends while not closing you off to those two disparate candidates.
> Especially with a well known company like YC, it seems like they would have a solid lower bound so there's no need to list it.
That sounds like a great way to exploit the subset of candidates that don't know the unspoken rules of the valley. And given the variance of companies in YC, I don't think there is a known lower bound for every company.
There's a better way to get higher salaries: fight so that everyone gets a higher one.
I have very rarely seen a startup actually cast a net this wide if they're truly looking for senior candidates.
https://www.dwt.com/blogs/employment-labor-and-benefits/2021...
I can recount cases where I've worked with relatively new engineers (a couple years out of college) who were easily 3-4x as productive as some of their peers. Of course, the pay scale for "Software Engineer" usually only has a band width of about 15-20%. Yes, the better programmer would get promoted faster, but still I've nearly always seen that there is more variance in "creative"-type jobs than pay scales will allow.
So for these types of jobs, posting a payscale is nearly always a bad idea, because it can further compress what is already a "too compressed" payscale.
HN, as in the site ran by a cutthroat venture capitalist firm... and you describe that as progressive?
This is the same VC that funded and financially enabled LendUP, which according to CFPB, was quoted saying "We are shuttering the lending operations of this fintech for repeatedly lying and illegally cheating its customers". https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-shutt...
No. A union is progressive. A worker cooperative ala Mondragon is progressive. These are corporate capitalists doing venture capitalist-y things.
In deterministic conversations, a naive opinion stated with a lot of authority would be shut down quite quickly (eg: many areas in programming where you can quickly prove something to be right or wrong). You can't do that in politics, business, and many other areas. As a result, we have about 8 billion politicians and business experts.
The author is making the assumption that listing a salary is connected to being a progressive business. A bunch of other people take this a step further and state how not listing the salary is a part of some conspiracy (in YC's case, apparently this is an attempt to lower the payroll costs of their portfolio companies).
The reality is that even the most transparent companies out there (eg: Gitlab) do not disclose individual salaries. No, it has nothing to do with some secret plan to underpay anyone or certain groups. It's simply a fact that people become incredibly irrational when it comes to compensation, and the minute you lay it out in the open, you open up a huge surface area for conflict. Last year we learned that encouraging political activism at work has a similar dynamic, and many companies have made that a no go zone as well. It's not because they are racist or don't care - it's because it takes a tiny minority of people to get the entire business derailed, and it's hard enough to keep that from happening in the best of times; once you add a catalyst like salaries or politics, it's like adding fuel to the fire.
But rather than ask ourselves why the leaders at Gitlab and millions of others companies have made the decisions they did, it's a lot easier to just make assumptions - "it must be coming from a bad place, so let me brainstorm what some of those bad places could be."
I'll take it a step further - Colorado State Senator Jessie Danielson would make you believe it's more likely that millions of companies are "bad actors" than that she just doesn't have the relevant experience in business to predict which way her bill was going to work out. Now that she's cost so many of her constituents lucrative remote jobs, it's too late to admit Mea Culpa, and instead it's everyone else's fault. If she was held a bit more accountable, the next time someone tries to bridge the gender pay gap they will hopefully spend some time interviewing and learning from people who have the relevant experience in hiring.
I think this misses the point, and I think the idea of a "huge surface area for conflict" also misses the point.
In the end, unless an entity is a public benefit corp or a not-for-profit, the literal sole goal is to profit. "Reducing surface area for conflict" is one of many steps on the way to the goal for profit, and if cutting out Colorado is less painful to profits than disclosing salaries and opening up that conflict surface, then that's naturally what will happen.
Colorado doesn't really need to apologize. They made a bet that their state was relevant to remote work, and they lost that bet for some number of companies (I can think of plenty with no Colorado carve-outs and with specific disclosures due to Colorado despite not having a presence in the state, so clearly some firms think the talent pool is worthwhile), and that's to be expected given Colorado isn't one of the most populous states in the country. That calculus quickly changes for many more companies if it turns out the population of remote talent in Colorado is trending upward and worth tapping into, or if California etc pass similar legislation.
When trying to build an argument from first principles, it's important not to make a mistake early on. In your case, you use the profit seeking as an argument that this automatically leads to minimizing everyone's salaries.
In reality, profit gets maximized when you have a team full of high achievers and with very low turnover. That's fundamentally not compatible with your original hypothesis.
Where did I say this, or even imply it?
> In reality, profit gets maximized when you have a team full of high achievers and with very low turnover. That's fundamentally not compatible with your original hypothesis.
I mean, if I made that claim, I'd agree with you, but I'm currently quite lost as to how that conclusion was reached. I said and implied nothing about minimizing salaries.
So you implied that disclosing salaries cuts into profits, which I took to mean that you're seeing an inverse first-order relationship between salaries and profits.
> "Reducing surface area for conflict" is one of many steps on the way to the goal for profit, and if cutting out Colorado is less painful to profits than disclosing salaries and opening up that conflict surface, then that's naturally what will happen.
> In reality, profit gets maximized when you have a team full of high achievers and with very low turnover.
Profit is a function with lots and lots of parameters. Who are you to say which parameter has the highest weight? How about market share? How about profit margins? How about illegal deals with public funding? How about marketing? How about creating addictions? How about being niche? How about having excellent customer support? How about having better quality?
Lots of companies make significant profit from a legacy project that's almost impossible to improve, but marketing still finds clients that want it. They don't need a team full of high achievers with very low turnover.
https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/new-nyc-law-will-require-...
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-york-city-council-p...
> In providing the salary range, an employer must use good faith to determine, at the time of the posting, what it believes it would pay for the advertised job, promotion, or transfer opportunity.
As a former lawyer, I would say the phrase "good faith" is the operative one here. Companies will want to stay far enough from the line so that they don't get sued.
idk what legal precedent is, but if i was hiring i could make a large good faith salary range.
job candidates are different. post a large but meaningful skills list youre looking for and be willing to hire the right person that doesnt meet all your bullet points. a college grad with 0 experience or a no-college with 4 years of experience or a college grad+4 years exp all might be the right person, but deserve significantly different salaries.
What'd be interesting would be how often a company offers near the top of that range, or potentially beyond it. I'd think the frequency of offers (either far below the maximum or actually above the maximum) would make a potential case against a company for not listing ranges in good faith.
(ianal)
But the possibility otherwise satisfied employees being paid a market wage commensurate with their experience might see ads for jobs similar to theirs and conclude they're being systematically underpaid and motivated to take legal action is definitely a negative second order effect of the law...
The fact is that companies engage and enable each other to perpetuate information asymmetries. They run me through the ringer of hours of take-home projects, algorithm tests, whiteboarding, phone screens, video calls, panel interviews, all in an effort to widen the information asymmetry. We simply ask for companies to reveal what they are willing to pay before wasting our time with bullshit.
A real answer is for software engineers and other knowledge workers to unionize. It's very clear that these companies are willing and able to approach employment relationships asymmetrically. Historically, the answer has been collective bargaining. It took decades for remote work to be "approved" by these companies, and it's clear that reasoning was that the status quo was to the benefit of the companies.
I relish imagining all of these outspoken techy leftists actually putting up and making moves that align with addressing the true center of inequities: economic relationships. I know it's wishful thinking. It's a lot easier to rail against Netflix content and Facebook algorithms than it is to engage in real radical politics.
Not true - I am not saying that the market cannot be whipped into shape. What I am saying is it cannot be done by someone who doesn't understand the market.
It sounds you have a background in engineering - would you let a PR person tell you how to do your work? Obviously not. Well, Jessie Danielson is about as close to recruiting as a PR person is to coding (look up her bio and ask yourself what she's done outside of politics). Why trust that she knows how recruiting should work?
I understand what you mean in regards to a market understanding. I think our comments compliment each other. That includes a lack of faith of government interventions in those types of atomic market relationships. I can't suss out your political leaning. Either my bias gives me tunnel vision or the only viable option is collective bargaining.
As far as collective bargaining goes, I first lived in a communist country, then in a social democracy, and now in the US. I think it could work, but I have never seen it implemented well. My main concern is that China will kick everyone's ass, and the friction that collective bargaining introduces into a system will make it more difficult to defend against that scenario.
If you applied this ideal generally, you get a really counterintuitive legislative system ("you must elect a medical doctor before any laws regarding medicine can be passed", "only Google and Facebook and Amazon are experts in consumer advertising, so only elected ex-employees can propose consumer privacy legislation"), so it's probably not a very good one.
Based on many of the outputs of the system, I can believe that.
However, based on context of your post, I think you intended to include a negating word in that sentence.
You must be joking? You encouraged political activism at work and are surprised it led to problems? Is political activism code for “so long as it follows my politics”? Would you encourage a pro-lifer to be just as active as pro-choices? In any company I’ve worked at, the answer would be no.
People always seem to be surprised that others think differently than they do. I really can’t believe the hubris that goes into that. When talking to people (who suck at discourse) who think they are tolerant, but really aren’t, the conversation almost always devolves to “you’re a Nazi”. When talking to people (who suck at discourse) who think are very right wing, the conversation tends to devolve into something about how God made people/ the world / etc.
The easiest thing is just give people three PTO days that don’t carry that you encourage to use for civic purposes, but don’t enforce, and maybe set up a matching donation up to $X for any org with the valid paperwork.
Airlines pay just like that (as do taxi companies and most other parts of the transportation industry). Guess what you all have in common? Zero agency. So when you take a job where the ideal output of your labor is 100% deterministic, then it makes sense for your pay to reflect that.
Yes, if you have their full and work performance history you can determine their salary. But most people are actually quite uncomfortable with sharing their performance publicly.
In other words: "we can't be transparent, it might make us look bad."
"John will ask why Sandy is making more. The truth is that Sandy is more productive, and saying that to John will lead to friction. John will either need to make more money (which will piss off Sandy), or Sandy will need to get promoted to the same level as her manager (which will piss off her manager because what is she going to do now?). So who do we piss off? Wait, why do we need to piss off anyone - let's just keep the salaries private."
What makes you think people always discuss salary? Because it seems rational from a negotiating standpoint?
These secret decisions are not commonly rational like that. Maybe Sandy keeps quiet when they know the boss is wrong and leaves it to John to speak up and stop the whole thing going over the cliff edge.
Like if you're able to describe how Sandy is more valuable, you can describe that to John, and he can emulate it, and everybody wins.
But the biggest problem is that if you wanted this "fixed", you can only raise salaries of people who make too little. Lowering salaries of people who make too much is usually a legal impossibility.
So the effect will be that you risk ending up overpaying everybody instead of only an outlier now and then.
Perhaps that's what these laws are attempting to address ;)
What law is this? I have never heard of it in any US jurisdiction.
In the event there is a contract, unless the contract specifies compensation for terminating employment, the employer can always just terminate the employee for the reason of “this employee is no longer worth $x per hour/year to us”. Barring any other union agreements of course.
The real problem for companies is when the explanation comes down to "Sandy negotiated harder than you", "Sandy got a higher offer from a competitor so we had to match it to keep her", "we're paying you significantly under the market rate and are hoping you don't notice or aren't too bothered by it", etc.
What is much harder to accept, and builds resentment and apathy, is something that feels arbitrary or unjust.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/california_equal_pay_act.htm
It's illegal to pay differently on the basis of sex, race, or other protected classes. It's perfectly legal to pay differently on the basis of performance or anything that isn't a protected class.
The vast, vast majority of workplaces in America pay people at the same level different amounts.
https://www.costanzo-law.com/google-hit-with-lawsuit-over-cl...
Perhaps the more productive worker is more productive because their work is not high-visibility. Maybe it's the arbitrary luck of having been assigned a more successful project.
Depending on what you mean by "equivalent", yes it could make some claims of discrimination based on race/sex/etc slightly harder to defend against. It does not "open" a company to lawsuits as opposed to being closed to suits by paying equivalent wages. It is one of many many things that could be a factor in such cases. And a lot of companies decide it is worthwhile to do despite that.
> You can and should ask your peers what they make. This is totally legal and encouraged.
It's not encouraged by many companies, and some try to discourage it including by trying to get employees to agree not to, whether or not it's legal.
This system is doomed long-term if it only works because of information imbalance, since ways will be found around that (levels.fyi, random walk across employers, ...).
What has that accomplished?
If you've ever been a part of the performance review process, you will know that people will go very far to justify a raise. Looking at the current job listings on your company's career section will be the very first thing that everyone will do if those salaries were to be made public.
That's even more likely to be the case when there are strict guidelines around compensation (eg: when salaries are public). When your manager has some wiggle room, you might be able to justify a bigger bump than average because of all the extra hard work you're putting in, even if your experience level doesn't qualify you for a straight up promotion.
What you’re really saying is that making the information available makes it harder for companies to retain employees using the status quo tactics. Which increases turn-over, which in reality is the businesses problem not the employees. So from the employee perspective what is the problem in being better informed about the price dynamics within the market?
If you’re asking about listing individual salaries, I think some employees would object and, unless they signed onto the job with that expectation, as an employer I don’t believe I’m morally right to publish their currently private information without their consent, nor tell them “you can quit if you don’t like it”. (I have absolutely no problem with anyone voluntarily disclosing their own information, discussing it, comparing it, whatever.)
So, out of accounting spite, many companies are opting for churn instead of stability by simple raise vs new hire policy, making it worse for everyone.
I'm not sure if it has changed now, but Gitlab used to have a big problem with the way they calculated compensation. Their calculations were very heavily weighted against the Numbeo rental prices, which meant you had someone living in London, UK would earn 40% more than someone living in Bristol, UK, even though the cost of living in both cities is pretty similar.
Never lived in Bristol, but I can't believe this. The calculations are heavily weighted against rental prices because accommodation is a large part of most people's expenses.
I guess I never feel the need to justify a raise. If I need to justify it I’ve already failed I think.
This right here I think is the real reason companies do not disclose compensation in their listings. Their current employees fall below the range and they do not want them to know. This is unfortunately a widespread problem in tech, where companies constantly offer more for new hires than what they pay their own employees for the same work. The new hires that have joined will then find themselves in the same position next year when their compensation falls below what someone will be hired at that year! And the cycle continues. It's absolute madness if you look at it from the big picture perspective and there are some fundamental problems with the way HR orgs are structured that need to change. From an employee perspective, the most optimal thing you can do for yourself is to move companies frequently and that is the reason for the crazy churn we see in this industry.
For most companies, this will make them less resistant to boom and bust as they'll be forced to offer big annual payrises which they won't be able to roll back when the market contracts.
GP didn't say that there are good reasons to underpay experienced staff compared to new staff, he said that there are good reasons that salaries cannot be raised across the board.
No. This is exactly what GP said:
> there were reasons good reasons why salary couldn't just be raised across the board to match new hire rates.
There is not a single company I can think of (other than FAANG or unicorn startups flush with VC money) that can raise salaries across the board, they simply do not have the cash-flow to do it.
I agree, but the reality is that raising salaries across the board would kill the company immediately, while having ONLY inexperienced staff might happen, and even if it did, it only might kill the company.
Another factor is that a lot of the staff just won't move, even if they know they are being paid less.
I get that the short-term justification is "we can get away with paying the former less because enough of them will be afraid to leave."
But is there another justification?
In my experience, at large companies "cash flow" would not even vaguely register the difference of increasing salaries for experienced people you want to keep, and it would be a marvelous signal to the rest.
You can use a bonus to cover fluctuations without hurting morale too much.
Plus you don't have to give everyone an automatic raise If you post new jobs at a higher rate. Just give them a new title, and allow current employees to apply for them.
My current employer isn't willing to raise the salaries of its current employees, not the market ones, but to the level of what they are offering to new hires. This, in my opinion, is wrong. This also inevitably leads to eventually paying everyone at market value (old employees leaving replaced by new ones with up-to-date salaries) except that you as a company lost a lot of business experience in the process.
Even in the case that no company on earth would disclose salaries, workers will inevitably learn about what their current market value is and to some extent what new hires and colleagues roughly earn. Because they have friends and colleagues that are open about disclosing their salaries. Trying to hide salary information is just lying to yourself (as a company).
Companies should budget for hire once their workforce is roughly on par with the market, salary wise. It's not the only factor but they would be able to retain much more talent and expertise inside the company and eventually be able to generate more value. This situation in my opinion is one of the big reasons (out of many others of course) why most companies eventually turn bad after some time.
You assume:
a) Companies will by necessity pay people doing ostensibly the same thing different amounts of money
b) People do not necessarily wish for their salary to be made public
c) Making a salary range requires the lower and upper bound to be equidistant from the expected starting pay
d) Making too narrow a salary range would therefore reveal pay, in contradiction to b).
Therefore, it is a necessity of employees' desired privacy and employers' ability to advertise the lowest, er, "most competitive" wage possible for the company to have a wide salary range.
EDIT to add: I think your argument still falls a little flat, because salary ranges should still be accurate. "We would consider hiring someone with slightly less resume experience for the bottom range, we would hire a rockstar demigod at the highend, and just what we're looking for somewhere around the middle".
So the point of not listing the salary is to attract highly qualified candidates who don't know they're worth more than the role pays? That doesn't seem to be a good thing.
I would say "this new position you are hiring for gets paid more than I do for the same work" is a very good justification for a raise. :)
If companies can be held accountable for injustices like this one, that can only be a good thing. Well, except if you're scared your employees will catch you out.
For the record: I've played the part of the employer in this specific issue and learned my lesson.
I think this is missing the point. Do you think employers coercing employees into accepting conditions below what they should normally get is not a thing that happens? The employer, as opposed to the employee, has the power to manipulate the socioeconomic circumstances around the employee. They can (and do) prevent employees from discussing politics at the workplace or unionising, they can (and do) hide (and manipulate) information about who is getting paid what, they can (and do) decline additional compensation when it should be given (overtime), and this is the least of it.
You might think, “well, the employees should just get a different job then!”. But don't we want to fix the underlying problem instead of just churning our way through countless jobs? Sometimes it doesn't even work — you are often compelled to stay at a job for various reasons (you relocated with your family, you've worked there for a long time etc.), and you might not even realise this manipulation is happening to begin with.
The above comment said that employees will go very far to justify a raise. Don't you think that, if employees had all of the information their employers had, a lot of employees _would be_ able to justify a raise that they deserve, perhaps even without having previously realised this because of the information asymmetry? That sounds like an injustice to me.
To work at a job is to actively consent to that job.
It's hard to make an argument that you owe them notice if they didn't give notice of a significant change in working conditions.
We're not talking about coercion. Concealing the wages of other people in the organization is not coercion.
> You might think, “well, the employees should just get a different job then!”. But don't we want to fix the underlying problem instead of just churning our way through countless jobs?
No, we don't. The way we fix the problem is by choosing with whom we do business. "countless jobs" is a straw man.
The problem is, this often doesn't happen. The employee being paid too little (or working too long, or being otherwise treated poorly) might not know they are being coerced into this bad position, might not know how much their employer is hiding from them, may not want to go through the considerable effort of interviewing for another job, may not have the financial stability to put their family through that period of job hunting, or may just be of a non-contrarian disposition and enjoy having their stability in the current job.
There are a million reasons an employee would not respond to a blatant injustice by precisely identifying it and demanding it be righted or otherwise quitting. If you do do this, I truly think that is fantastic and I commend you. The ones who stay in these jobs, however, are being badly treated, at the employer's benefit. I don't think that's right, and I don't think they can be fully blamed, because a lot of these problems come from how adept the employer is at manipulating the situation. If you say “no, we don't want to fix that”, I'm sorry to say I can't agree with you.
No it's not. If you are paying under average salaries, why do you deserve above average talent? ... Unless you admit it's just another rigged game (masked as meritocracy). It's sad.
That's less the case when you're constantly challenged with clean-sheet exercises where every single person will produce a different outcome. It doesn't even have to be a super senior job - think of someone writing newsletters. That channel can easily lead to 5% or more of total revenue, and different people will definitely produce different outcomes (just the subject line alone will have an impact). Why pay different people the same rate if their work leads to vastly different revenue?
I don’t think Gitlab is anywhere near the most transparent company. I’ve definitely seen companies proudy list all their employees’ salary in a blog post before, so the most transparent companies do actually do that (or they did when I saw their post a while back anyway).
To be fair I’ve never seen it in companies where it’s impossible for everyone to know everyone.
Compensation is not "derailing". It is a core function of the business to pay it's employees. It's a core function of employees to make sure they aren't getting ripped off.
It's plainly ridiculous to be told that what ones coworkers get paid is of no relevance to oneself. This is enlightened self-interest, not guilty grandstanding for some abstract cause or whatever.
And contrary to some (such as yourself), there are people who do not state their opinions with the authority of a subject matter expert when they are not, whether the conversation is deterministic or not.
This is not the reality. For instance, here are the salaries of everybody who works at Buffer: https://buffer.com/salaries
Once you step outside of the USA, it becomes more common – for instance, everybody’s taxable income is a matter of public record in several European countries.
It's also one of the first things I'm going to want to know before interviewing somewhere, so I can make sure that I'm not wasting anyone's time.
It might worth asking laborers if this is worth it for better pay / more pay equality.
If all laborers were happy before and then you introduce transparent pay, and suddenly 90% of people are unhappy - it might seem obvious this is bad.
But that's sort of like saying the truth is bad if it hurts your feelings. Is it?
It's not immediately clear to me what exactly you think the consequences of publishing salaries are, what bad behaviour you think this promotes, and why you suspect this bad behaviour happens. Could you please go into more detail?
I have had the opposite experience. It can result in conflict if salaries are by default kept secretive, and then someone finds out they're being paid much less than someone else. People start feeling undervalued or unappreciated. If salary ranges and structure are out in the open for everyone during the application process, there's nothing to get into a conflict over. Applicants know how the salary structure works and what they'll be making, so it avoid conflicts _early_ because those who might not be happy with the salary information can simply not apply for the job.
When doing a monthly/quarterly or yearly plan, there is a budget set for human resources. Theres an allocated budget for each open position, and a plan of when those positions will be opened .
Even at the most chaotic there was something like that.
All companies could easily use that budget as a proxy to provide at least a range for each position.
Most dont do it because they dont want to leave money on the table.
Finland makes every tax-paying citizen’s salary public, and their society hasn’t descended into chaos.
Here's how it looks:
https://rekvizitai.vz.lt/m/en/company/uber_lithuania_softwar...
I got to a point in my career where this was one of the first conversations - either when I was hiring or had someone reach out to see if I wanted a new gig. It wastes everyone's time if we're not in the same approximate range. At many companies, it really isn't a surprise anyway - sure maybe you are coming from far away and need some relocation help and I'm remote and don't need that, but we both get the same vesting schedule, etc. Frankly, if a company is coy about the approximate structure of their comp packages all it really does is tell me that they see me as expendable. Why would I want to go someplace where we are trying to screw each other over from the very beginning of the relationship?