Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges
I am currently job hunting. I started looking locally, everything lists salary ranges, perfect. I can know which positions to skip and which ones might be a good match right away. No need to waste time with 7 rounds of interviewing only to find out the salary is 50% of what I currently make.
Now I've begun widening my search to remote work, as the idea of commuting to an office in 2022 is completely insane to me.
Most jobs on nation-wide job boards do not post a salary range. I will not even click on those job postings. It's simply not worth it.
Further, after seeing so many positions listed _with_ salary ranges, when I see one without a salary range it makes me feel like you have something to hide and are trying to trick me.
So the next time your team starts discussing why you can't seem to hire, maybe ask if you are publicly posting salary ranges on these positions?
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThe vast majority of developer jobs offer no equity comp.
> Compensation and Benefits to Disclose. Employers must include in each job posting (1) the rate of compensation (or a range thereof), including salary and hourly, piece, or day rate compensation; (2) a general description of any bonuses, commissions, or other compensation; and (3) a general description of all benefits the employer is offering for the position. Benefits that must be generally described include health care, retirement benefits, paid days off, and any tax-reportable benefits, but not minor “perks” like use of an on-site gym or employee discounts. At a minimum, employers must describe the nature of these benefits and what they provide, not specific details or dollar values — such as listing that the job comes with “health insurance,” without needing to detail premium costs or coverage specifics — and cannot use an open-ended phrase such as “etc.,” or “and more,” rather than provide the required “general description of all of the benefits
By my reading, that just means that they have to disclose that equity compensation is available, not the amount of that equity compensation. Contrast that with "the rate of compensation (or a range thereof), including salary and hourly, piece, or day rate compensation," which actually requires a number.
> It is the intent of the general assembly to pass legislation that helps to close the pay gap in Colorado and ensure that employees with similar job duties are paid the same wage rate regardless of sex, or sex plus another protected status.
where "wage rate" is:
> FOR AN EMPLOYEE PAID ON AN HOURLY BASIS, THE HOURLY COMPENSATION PAID TO THE EMPLOYEE PLUS THE VALUE PER HOUR OF ALL OTHER COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS RECEIVED BY THE EMPLOYEE FROM THE EMPLOYER; AND
> (b) FOR AN EMPLOYEE PAID ON A SALARY BASIS, THE TOTAL OF ALL COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS RECEIVED BY THE EMPLOYEE FROM THE EMPLOYER.
Any judge is going to look at the intent in order to help resolve ambiguity in interpretation.
If stock option compensation need only be advertised as "we offer stock options" then my uninformed impression is that that would negate the intent of the bill.
Contact a Colorado lawyer for actual meaningful advice.
You can just ask at the end of the first interview. I've never had a problem doing so.
On the other hand, giving a range and getting offered the bottom (which we already agreed is sufficient, otherwise why is it your bottom?) gives you the opportunity to negotiate non salary terms like health care, holiday, work from home, etc.
You can argue that it shouldn't, but people are people.
The ones who get offended usually pay less and have had issues with employees quiting over low salaries and/or have heard negative candidate feedback around pay
Whenever I've been looking for work I'll google, search linkedin, etc, and pick the top three/four companies that seem interesting. I exclude any that don't include a salary range, and any which have "common knowledge" shared locally about them being bad companies.
For the past few years that's been sufficient, sometimes I get an offer and accept, sometimes I have to choose between two offers. I've not even always taken the higher offers, because money is important, but it's not the only thing that matters when picking a job.
Personally I feel it is such a waste of time to discover if the salary doesn't meet your expectations after 3-5 rounds of song & dance.
By definition, a shortage of labor sellers means labor sellers have an advantage in negotiations. From what I understand about Japan, even in the tech sector, the quality of life for labor sellers is pretty bad with long hours and not much room for high pay.
I imagine if Japanese tech workers has the option of working for employers with compensation offerings like Google and Apple and other US companies, then they would not accept the quality of life that they are. And even with the terrible quality of life they have now, the Japanese world keeps spinning, so any shortage is clearly not short enough to be a showstopper (in the short term).
So it boils down to the working culture, no? The one I referenced initially..
My wife is interviewing for Oracle HR right now (mostly done deal). She is due for the final interview tomorrow. The offer has still not mentioned her compensation yet - although from hearsay she knows a ballpark. It seems even American companies play by Japanese ways when in Japan.
Culture would take a backseat and the Japanese execs would start talking compensation real fast.
Clearly whoever is in charge of hiring at Oracle for your wife’s position is betting that your wife will not mind waiting to discuss compensation and/or they can find someone else if your wife does bring it up. Simultaneously, your wife is betting that she cannot find another position if she brings up compensation at a point that she thinks could cost her the offer.
If your wife was indispensable to Oracle HR, and she wanted to bet on that, there is no reason she cannot start talking compensation whenever she wants. Or if she has alternatives that are willing to talk compensation, then she can skip Oracle HR and move on to better options.
This is untrue. 1) Employers have more information about the current situation than applicants, and 2) employers collude, applicants don't.
Hence the importance of price transparency, and laws requiring a minimum pay figure are a start.
The meagre salaries tell a different story.
Its like how you're aware of a price of an item across different stores or markets. Same - but the item is a tech employee.
Salarymen do have long working hours & have to go along with those office drinking parties etc. But at the same time, they are treated more personally than an American enterprise employee would. Parents sick in old age? Many companies would give cash incentives to support. Buying a house? CEO might extend you a personal credit line or speak to his banker buddy to give you extremely favorable terms. Got married or had a child? Employers (not coworkers) would give you off-days & some cash/gifts to newborn. Did extremely well a financial quarter? You get a bonus "red letter" (typically a cheque or cash of good amount) or a paid short vacation. If you have passed your probation, Japanese companies will bend over their back to retain you (retrain, reassign under different manager etc.) rather than outright fire you (although thats slowly changing with the economy shrink)
Traditional Japanese companies treat their employees as half families. Managers tend to be more hands-on as a patriarch for the good or the bad. So while we concentrate mostly on the bad parts, we often overlook the good parts too.
I am in no way advocating their culture. Many things desperately need change. But if salaryman situation was so miserable, it would have changed a lot of things long time ago. No matter where we're born - freedom & comfort are valuable for everyone.
Managers becoming patriarchs (or even companies) can change the culture to then make individuals dependent on them. No patriarch, severely restricted options. That's a huge issue in Japan, and it's a huge issue outside Japan as well.
Giving people the stink eye for just mentioning leaving a company makes it easier for malicious companies (black companies in particular) to sink their teeth into naïve individuals. We see this problem in the West as well. We all know employees leave for pretty obvious reasons (and the reason they apply is obvious), but saying anything bad is the #1 sin of any job interview for very, very superficial reasons.
And neither of these are required to keep most of the solely good things.
>[...] these are required to keep most of the solely good things.
Which things?
Since changing jobs is seen as a huge risk and the culture among individuals is to remain loyal, it allows black companies to take advantage of naïve, mostly young individuals. You see similar things outside Japan, but less stigma on changing jobs makes it easier to get away from these situations.
>Which things?
E.g.: you don't need to be extremely judgmental of individuals ditching a job to still have the benefits of loyal employees being rewarded and having a family feeling within the company. Which would solve most of the problems with bad/malicious companies taking advantage of the situation.
[0]: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/japanese-black-companies/
I'm generally in favor of posting salary ranges. I like to know how the company values the positions they are hiring for, and I don't really want to talk to a recruiter at all if it's not going to be a salary match, so I like the idea of being able to screen better as a candidate.
But now that I've been on the hiring side, there's some flexibility I think we lose if we post those ranges: what do you do if you like a candidate, but not for the role they applied for? Perhaps their skills and background are not quite what you're looking for in this role, but you know another team has an open rec and this candidate is perfect. Or, maybe you've posted for a particular seniority range and you like the candidate but they are more/less senior than the posting, and you want to scale the position up or down to meet them. Neither of these scenarios (which seem to happen with regularity) preclude putting the range in the job description, but then the redirect or rescope feels bait-and-switchy when it's really not.
So, if your expectations are below what they are willing to pay, they'll just offer your less?
(Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-that-remote-job-opening-real...)
I see the same exact position posted 20 times by the same 3rd party recruiter.
I see positions posted as listed in Zurich with a title of "Software Engineer, Bangalore Office (relocation provided)" which is listed 30 times for the 30 biggest cities in the world.
I see positions deleted and being re-created daily to pop up in job seeker's filters again.
You could argue anything using this as data.
Nonetheless, to your point, whether salary ranges are posted or not is likely a moot point. The truth is you might see anywhere near 50-100% dispersion for a role. Figure out what range or number you're looking for, see if they can offer it on the first call, and go from there. If you're really insistent on that as a prescreen, do what I did when I was in your shoes and use a platform like Hired that lets you prescreen offers.
I just think that if I were you, I would be careful about having an attitude that implies "I know why you can't hire and you don't." The process you are in is much more similar to dating than it is to a standardized test being taken. Top hiring managers at top companies are not having trouble hiring (myself included) because they are not squeaky wheels. We're hiring silently, paying above market, getting inbound referrals. And similarly, top candidates are not having trouble sourcing multiple offers because they can command a premium (which was always the case for me when the shoe was on the other foot).
My advice to you would be to rely on your skills and ability to get competing offers which you play against each other to do the heavy lifting of increasing your salary. Then it won't matter whether companies post salary ranges or not. If, on the off chance you aren't able to get multiple competing offers, then I think you have your work cut out for you and I would highly recommend to sharpen your interviewing abilities first as that will serve your career very well in the long run.
My approach would not be quite that categorical/binary though, for couple of reasons
1. Sometimes salary ranges are wide enough to not be meaningful - i.e. 80-200k
2. When I'm in the hiring manager role these days, there are roles for which I have limited to no flexibility; but also roles for which I have or can fight for flexibility for the right candidate. If I post e.g. (random numbers) 100-120 Croatian Lipa, for some roles that's hard limit, for others it's the middle section of a bell curve: If I get an exceptional candidate way at the tail of bell curve, I may be able to obtain exceptional compensation. (why not just post that in the first place? See #1. Answers/solutions are easy only if you don't consider enough questions/cases/consequences:).
So if I were looking for a job (not currently), and I see a posting with an interesting role on a very interesting project at a supremely interesting company, I might approach the interview more as "open the door slightly, peak inside, and see what we can come up with for mutual benefit", rather than a strictly interpreted formal requirements description.
Realistically this happens very little in the candidate's favor (they undervalue themselves and the employer decides to throw them a massive bone), which leaves cases where you initially lowballed them and they called you out on it / you realize throwing the lowball offer is not going to work. By forcing ranges, you're flipping the script. Odds are you'll quickly find out what prices these exceptional candidates are going for anyway.
I agree it's not black-and-white, but you're largely arguing for your employer's convenience, not the candidate's.
It is always meaningful for a labor seller to know the lower bound.
But yes; two people could have the same title on their business card, and bring different expertise and experience, perform different duties and contributions, generate different value, and have different compensation.
I would think this is trivially true - e.g. you have "CEO"s that make any given amount of money, with order of magnitude different compensations even though their title and even job description may be at some level comparable (though CEO compensation is famously contentious, and I for one think should be less extreme, but that's another topic entirely).
I was in a company where "Senior Developer" meant "I've been hanging around this place for 12 months after graduating", and another place where "Senior Developer" meant "I can code a space shuttle AND the HR database that supports the astronauts". "Enterprise Architect" or "Solution Designer" can similarly have vastly different experience, skills or contributions.
It comes down to what one truly means about "equivalent roles", and even more so "same work". I would intellectually assume there are situations and jobs where two people can truly be equivalent in every way; but it's rare where I'm at - we're all special snowflakes, not machines which reliably and boringly produce consistently the same output.
Example,FWIW: my background is as "PeopleSoft Administrator" - basically a sysadmin/DBA/NetworkAdmin/infra in PeopleSoft ecosystem. The skillset and output is vastly, vastly different between two people in the same role. From those who can follow a checklist and mostly reliably build a server if told exactly what to do, to those who can design and risk asses/mitigate massive systems, and troubleshoot critical production problems.
What happens is - lets say I have two senior and one junior PSADMIN on the team, and I want to grow the team, so I open a junior psadmin seat to get somebody to train up. But then I interview somebody and holly caramoli, this person can whip weblogics into submission and optimize queries and create new indexes and automate maintenance like nobody's business; I want that person; I need that person on my team; this person can mentor my senior psadmins and bring everybody up and help us out hugely. I would now like to offer this person a higher salary than I had in mind for the original junior psadmin role I posted.
It happens other way around - I open a senior PSADMIN seat, but I get an eager, enthusiastic new grad who was bold enough to apply, and we think we can train them up but not necessarily at the rate for the Senior PSADMIN seat.
And if I want to capture every conceivable edge case for the seat I open, add geographical dependencies and what not, yeah, the range will be pretty wide. OR, if the range is narrow enough to be useful AND enforced, it'll severely limit the flexibility of who and what I can hire.
Do note I started my initial comment explicitly through my personal lens if I were to apply as a candidate, but with some limited experience in hiring - sure, I like ads that have salary ranges; but my original point was simple - I would not, as a candidate, necessarily binary reject posts without salary; and I might even apply for positions with posted salary range which is too high or too low for my expectations (yes, I once negotiated salary down, because I wanted to put a limit on my scope & responsibilities). I have also, as an employee, personally shied away from public sector positions with grid salaries. To each their own but wanted to share my perspective :)
I understand we all want to feel indignant and upset at injustice (myself included!:), and there&...
The range is often a leaky abstraction anyway. As a hiring manager I've wanted flexibility for the right candidates. As a candidate I've wanted to know that comp is more personalized than arbitrarily capped by a bureaucratic process.
I respond to most recruiters now that I won't even talk to them without a salary range. And then they send it right over.
"I would love to chat to you on the phone about this on the phone with you!"
"How dare you ask me that, you should be thankful for me even writing to you with this incredibly vague offer in the first place."
I tried responding to ~20 recruiters with a copy-pasted question about salary, and none responded with anything even close to a salary range, only the responses above.
Needless to say, I have simply given up responding to recruiters at all.
I'll keep watching out for the first.
Anyone who reacts negatively to the salary request, you ignore and move on. Don't even bother replying.
For the "lets hop on a call" folks, I have a second copy-paste that just politely states that my schedule is tight between interviewing and my day job and that I want to ensure a reasonable fit is possible before investing a lot of time.
Anyone who _still_ hasn't given a clear answer after those 2 tries I stop replying to.
To be clear, well north of 90% of inbound linkedin recruiters will fail this test, but I've found it to be a surprisingly low-effort way to separate valid opportunities from uninteresting recruiter spam
It seems to have been less active lately, but based on what you say, that may not be because employers are responding to the incentive...
I post the salary range for all the jobs that I list because it's a waste of everyone's time if we don't meet each other's expectations on some of those important points before investing more time in finding the right fit.
Recruiters don't like to post the salary range because they want to have a phone call with every candidate. There may have been a time when that made sense for them, but that time is not now. The job market is not the used car lot it used to be.
For example, clicking through the Accenture link to a job listing shows:
"As required by Colorado law under the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, Accenture provides a reasonable range of compensation for roles that may be hired in Colorado. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific office location. For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is $112,000-$134,000 and information on benefits offered is here."
https://careers.hcahealthcare.com/jobs/9031565-pulmonary-sla...
I see no salary ranges. I pulled some other medical jobs as well and it seems moderately random if they list anything at all. Really, I may be misunderstanding the law and what information is supposed to be disclosed, but the larger hospitals and medical groups in Colorado mostly don't post salary ranges.
You can submit anonymous complaints via the form through email. Screenshots are accepted.
https://cdle.colorado.gov/sites/cdle/files/Equal%20Pay%20Com...
You can do so anonymously.
Simple screenshots are accepted.
Submission can be sent by email, also anonymously : cdle_labor_standards@state.co.us
I'd suggest a burner email, if you'd like to stay anonymous : https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=burner+...
Please be kind to the worker that is processing these complaints.
Not everyone is like you. I don't think that you can generalize based on the criteria you use to filter out companies.
Personally, I'm 100% on board with OP's point. I've been putting out feelers lately, and I likewise interpret an unstated salary range as a warning sign. Who knows if they speak for the majority, but they're certainly not alone.
I think my point is... yes... it is very cool companies are posting salary ranges more often now. But it's just the beginning of the evaluation process. Bonuses, options, grants, etc. aren't listed and could be valuable.
A range is a minimum, plus more.
It's way worse than that. I recently had the displeasure of reading one of the dumbest thread of comments on a linkedin post because the job description did exactly that: mention the minimum salary.
It was a job post for a "seo and social media manager" position which can mean a lot of things, can mean everything and can mean nothing, depending on many factors (eg: company size, number of customers). The (minimum) pay was 20 k€ (south europe).
Everybody was looking at the number, no one had even considered it was the bare minimum and that maybe the original company was looking for some 20-something fresh out of high school, which no particular set of competencies.
If it's not a very long time, then why shouldn't everyone get a somewhat similar pay range? Unless the plan is the hire that person out of high school and then rapidly ramp up their pay as they get good.
> can mean everything and can mean nothing, depending on many factors (eg: company size, number of customers)
If the position might not be full time, then that's an important consideration. But if it is full time it shouldn't matter how big the company is or how many customers there are or how much "nothing" there is.
The ads performed equally well in regard to total responses with the better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges.
And... before you say, perhaps your salary ranges were bad, they weren't. Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit. In my opinion, salary is a sign of respect from you employer.
If your primary reason for responding to an ad is based upon salary you are not going to be happy where you work. I promise. Of the top reasons people are happy at work, salary is way down on the list. [0] It is important, it makes it possible to pay bills, but it isn't what makes people happy.
Meaning, if you are looking for a place you will enjoy working, do not start with salary.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/12/15/the-top-...
My gosh :face_palm:
>A 2014 SAP survey found that compensation is the #1 factor that matters most to employees.
>Another survey by the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) conducted in 2013 also found that compensation and pay was the #1 factor contributing to job satisfaction
Then later,
>Several other studies have also emerged around what employees care about at work but the most recent one from Boston Consulting Group which surveyed over 200,000 people around the world is one of the most comprehensive. Unlike previous studies which may point to flexibility or salary as the top factor for job happiness, BCG found that the #1 factor for employee happiness on the job is get appreciated for their work!
I don't know much about Boston Consulting Group, but my intuition says they may have been contracted by higher-ups with the intention of finding that exact conclusion. Cynical, yes, but so often that's how these consulting-funded-research-studies end up being. I can't speak for anyone else, but compensation is still above and beyond the most important factor when considering a job.
Compensation is important because of what you can do with it outside of work.
Or, realized new hires with less experience are being payed more? Or that colleagues that are slacking are being payed the same or more?
All these feel like concerns related to pay while working. I've certainly had those thoughts and was genuinely underplayed for half my career
More like "no amount of money is enough to make me happy doing this shit"
It's also not just the programming itself. I would turn down 7 digit compensation if it was going to mean intense burn out, depression and/or anxiety due to toxic management and impossible demands. The toll that shit takes on my personal life, my families lives and the way it removes my ability to even enjoy having that money for years afterwards isn't worth it.
You're conflating multiple things here. People aren't focusing on money because it's the most important part. They focus on money because it's one of the few things that's relatively easy to make tangible ahead of time. Similar goes for things like remote/hybrid, secondary benefits, etc.
Many elements on that list, while important, are incredibly difficult to equate in practice without speaking with employees or reading up on the company. Take the following:
>1 Appreciation for your work
How in the world are you going to evaluate this pre-interview or even post hiring process? Both parties are showing their best selves. It's incredibly abstract and difficult to measure.
>2 Good relationships with colleagues
Again, difficult to measure. Establishing good relationships takes time. Additionally, most places (at least here) have people who are decent to get along with, they aren't filled with horror individuals. At least, I'd hope hiring processes would at least filter the most obvious nutcases out after all those hours spent.
>3 Good work-life balance
Here's one you can measure much more easily. Few core hours and a "do whatever whenever" mentality outside of core hours attracts individuals. Still I don't see most companies post it. It goes far beyond hybrid and remote work, and even that is already hard to pull out of them. Then at the end of the interview, you get a "yeah we have a flexible schedule. Our hours are from 7 to 7." Great.. I guess.
Not only are you supporting my argument, you're also showcasing how ridiculously inefficient the hiring process is from the candidate's side. Without it being obvious whether this is a net gain for the employer.
I don't think the GP was arguing with you; was the poster's first comment on this article.
I'm paid to work 40h/week.
Am I going to be expected to be working more than that? If so, I'll pass.
If there's occasional overtime, sure, fine. But do I get paid extra for it? Does it get banked into extra PTO?
And so on, stuff I ask prospective employers in the first conversation.
I think things should be more based on goals than on time itself, honestly. What I mean is: if you work 40h but you do not deliver anything, how is that good compared to someone that in 32 delivers more? We have to put ourselves on the side of the employer also, even if some people hate them.
This is normal. This is OK.
Asking an employee make this a consideration when negotiating with an employer is a dereliction of duty on behalf of the hiring manager and difficult for the candidate to judge due to information asymmetry. If you're building a team, you should know what kind of talent fits on it and make an offer on those merits. That's what being a hiring manager entails.
What I mean, all in all, is: we all should care. That's why it is called an organization.
I agree with job about the job of a manager. I am just telling you that each one has her responsibility. All of us.
Even then, expectations of what a role does vary from one org to another. I don't think it's realistic to have someone outside of an organization say "I'm a senior/staff engineer" and for that person to have consistent expectations on what that statement means from for a potential employer from one interview to the next.
> I agree with job about the job of a manager. I am just telling you that each one has her responsibility. All of us.
No disagreement there. My intended point is what appropriate expectations are at various points of a potential employees tenure at an organization. A interviewee has no responsibilities: they have no employment contract and no expectations on them other than those a hiring team or manager brings into the room. The responsibilities come after the interviewee agrees to their job responsibilities and signs an employment contract.
If you were putting less than 40 hours a week in your timesheet, you had to use some form of paid time off (holiday, vacation, sick) or simply not get paid.
My contract specifically says I work 40h/week, have X days off/year (outside of statutory holidays) as PTO, etc.
This means that 5 days a week, I am at my keyboard, available on Slack, etc for 8 hours per day.
Hours are logged in a time tracking application (including time spent when there was nothing to do), and overages get added automatically to holiday time.
Maybe it's different elsewhere, but where all the tech companies are, it just doesn't work the way you're describing it. If you're being forced to punch a timecard and salaried, I would contact an attorney.
When I was salaried at a FAANG, they had us start clocking to pay OT when we exceeded 40h, which was most people much of the time. It was a way to keep the pay competitive. This was ten years ago, so no idea if that’s still a thing.
It also depends on :
1. How creative/smart we are in achieving outcomes with less work.
2. Would my company provides a platform to accelerate this?
The status quo is, you're not getting that information upfront. It would very much be useful for you to know before sinking in several hours of effort and accumulate stress, only to figure out it doesn't at all match your preferences and the remainder of the package doesn't make up for it.
It is also one of the few things that companies can do which won't increase costs when practiced properly. That's the whole point of the root comment, and it falls flat given most job ads are secretive about almost everything.
It doesn't generally depend on how creative/smart we are, nor even our outcomes with less work. You working on a task that is easy for you doesn't mean that I should work more and you should work less. It really just means that we can expect different things from you than me, which is realistic so long as they aren't vastly different on the same task.
Work-life balance doesn't really depend on anything the company does other than having policies that allow for it and then actually following through.
Obviously, salary is not the only criteria for picking a new role, but by publishing it upfront, you quickly sort out the expectations (which leads to less churn at later stages) and also contribute to a more inclusive and fair job market.
Some other points that we got as feedback from the tech communities:
- publishing tech stacks & engineering methodologies is quite useful too
- it's nice if a company provides a contact person for questions BEFORE applying
- you should act swiftly and not let candidates wait for weeks for your decision
[1] https://swissdevjobs.ch/
https://devitjobs.uk/
https://devitjobs.us/
https://germantechjobs.de/
> It is important, it makes it possible to pay bills, but it isn't what makes people happy. Meaning, if you are looking for a place you will enjoy working, do not start with salary.
This feels strange to me… I have a minimum salary for which I wouldn’t consider working for a company even if they offered me flying rainbow unicorns. It’s not a gajillion $FAANG but there is a minimum.
If I can get that at the beginning of the process, this saves both myself and the company time and money.
Anyway, do you apply this logic to your other vendors? Do you tell your accountant that you'll only pay them 70% of market because they should love what they do so much they shouldn't care what you pay them? They'd laugh you out of the room, and rightly so.
I enjoy my job and have turned down a few higher salary positions because the stress they would introduce into my life would result in an overall lower quality of living and the amount their offering isn't enough for me to burn myself out for a few years to coast for the rest of my life... but my SO is nearing retirement and is slowly working to scale back their working hours - the loss of their income will mean a return to the drawing board and more math to make sure we can continue live comfortably.
A good pun.
The money stops being enough after a surprisingly short time. It would be interesting to see how long people could stomach terrible work for great pay.
You have capped your own imagination. Whatever number you are considering, while you still think this is true, multiply it by 100.
> terrible work
I should clarify that I specifically mean unpleasant work. If it's literally killing me by say, inhalation of aerosolized pig brains or standing in cyanide or something, deal's off.
You wouldn't need to because if the pay is so great you can soon retire.
A company specifying an actual reason for rejecting a candidate? In writing??
(/j)
Whatever that big number is.. double it is what I'm saying!
1. The correlation is weak
2. It drops really quickly after satisifying the minimum
3. it's very different for every individual
Good recruiters try to look for compatibility here very early in the process; unfortunately most recruiters are not good.
Regarding performance of responses I am referring to count of unique respondents meeting minimum requirements.
Regarding 'better candidates', this is based upon the count of candidates which made it through team interviews and coding challenges.
Our process requires multiple manager/leader approvals at each step of the process which is intended to reduce bias.
It is possible the soft attributes of personality and communication are reflected better in one group than the other. I do not have evidence but is a possible source of unintended bias.
This is essentially Tinder “swipe left or right” and it should treated that way.
You might not be wrong, but a higher salary makes me less miserable than a lower salary
as you say, the salary is a sign of respect from your employer, and including that number in the job ad is an easy way to signal to prospective employees exactly how much you respect them.
Care to mention what they are? Because I suspect your ranges are out of line with industry standards that have risen quite rapidly.
I know because I've started responding to any recruiters that sound interesting asking for comp ranges and they are all below my current base, let alone TC.
If the upper bound of your range doesn't exceed $350k there is no chance that any of the senior engineers I know will apply and honestly to get something to think about leaving a job they are moderately happy with you'd have to have that be the lower bound of your range.
But I suspect you're posting ranges that are less than or barely over 200k at the upper end.
Outside of SV, that upper-bound is an absolutely wild number.
An insane number of startups have IPO'd in the last two years, and even with stock drops a lot of people suddenly have RSUs. In addition the rise in remote work has meant that near SV pay is much easier to obtain. Very few of my friends live in SV and I only know a few who aren't making at least that amount at the senior level.
That number is not at all wild for an upper-bound.
OP was discussing salary range, not total comp--but I'd be a little surprised to find that even TC at the $350k range at the top outside of SV firms is quite high.
I'm not totally persuaded by levels.fyi, but looking at metros at 90th percentile of SWE total comp:
Again, I'm not persuaded that the numbers from Levels are good, but $350k salary at an upper-bound still seems like a high number. $350k TC also seems high--but it's more attainable with RSUs or other equity options.I'd also be interested to see a breakdown based on the company type. There's room for SWEs in many companies, and the rates might break differently based on whether software is the primary product.
So right off the bat I'm not sure the point you're making. If the upper limit you are willing to pay does not exceed the 90th percentile TC, by definition you are not offering "very aggressive" pay. There are tons of mediocre, low paying software jobs out there, but posting that you are one of those is not going to attract more applicants. OP claims they are not one of those companies, and I disagree.
Second your numbers there aren't conditioning on seniority, and additionally given not only population size but proportion of tech jobs available the Bay area and NYC account for the majority of software jobs out there.
My point still stands that OPs company is in fact not offering "very aggressive" comp. Ignoring seniority (which will be weighted by more junior roles) not having the upper bound of comp being in the 90% means you are not really offering aggressive pay in the most major software markets.
> So right off the bat I'm not sure the point you're making.
That 350k yearly salary is a high number. Attainable, sure, but high, and not representative of typical SWE jobs for most people, senior-level included. Not that people cannot or don't make that, but that it's probably not the norm.
> If the upper limit you are willing to pay does not exceed the 90th percentile TC, by definition you are not offering "very aggressive" pay.
What qualifies as "very aggressive"? 99th? How is this determined? What, typically, is a business's approach towards determining salary ranges for positions?
FAANGs perhaps don't have to observe that approach, I suppose, given their resourcing and scale, but in my experience it's done by market comps.
> Second your numbers there aren't conditioning on seniority,
Fair enough: it does have an impact on the percentiles. I can't easily get them from Levels thanks to the relatively coarse granularity, but a couple quick observations:
In the Bay Area, the top 100 salaries for 5-10 YOE ("senior engineer" per Levels) have substantially higher rates of total comp: $710k-2+M (n=1 here). Most of this is not base salary (which topped out short of $400k) but stock and bonus.
Top 100 in NYC are similar, though smaller proportionately (tops out at 1.5M TC, N=1).
Top 100 in NoVA/DC is markedly lower (tops out at $500k TC).
> and additionally given not only population size but proportion of tech jobs available the Bay area and NYC account for the majority of software jobs out there.
With respect to where SW Eng jobs are located, that's a great question. I'm not sure how to quantify this very well, but for grins, I tried searching for senior-level positions on Indeed and LinkedIn.
Indeed found ~33k jobs, of which ~12k are represented in the locations on which I could filter. Of those 12k, 6021 were on the coasts (I counted anything in Washington, California, NoVA, NYC as coastal jobs but excluded lower-cost areas like Atlanta); I realize not all of these are in SV proper, but I think it probably captures the idea of high-cost/high-value markets for SWEs, and it makes the numbers more favorable against my point above. 3087 were listed as remote.
It's not well controlled, but Indeed's numbers suggest about 20% are in SV or SV-lite areas, and about 10% remote.
LinkedIn's job filters are maybe a bit more sophisticated? but don't offer the same sort of numerical granularity. I picked senior+ SW titles in the US (so included Lead, Principal), of which 43k+ hits were returned. The top ten markets they offer for search (Seattle, Austin, Boston, Atlanta, Charlotte, NYC, San Fran, Chicago, Sunnyvale, and LA) account for 11k results, about 25%. Excluding low-cost areas (Charlotte and Atlanta) returns 9K results, also about 20%.
So I don't feel terribly uncomfortable positing that of widely-advertised jobs, the high-value markets might account for 20-25% of the SWE job market. This is not a vast majority. The numbers could be off, of course--these aren't scientific samples, the searches will naturally have an impact on results, etc. But I don't think most people in software are working in SV, and I don't think most seniors routinely sniff a $350k salary.
Doesn't mean that the OP (GP? GGP?) is paying aggressively or that advertising salary or total comp is a bad idea--just that my initial reaction that $350 is a lot--seems like a reasonable take.
I know lots of people who would consider applying to your senior role, all else being good, if you're offering, say $250k or so -- but none of them are the people on my mental list of senior engineering contacts. Still, you might hire one of my mid-level engineering contacts, and you might be happy with them, since if you're paying only around $250k (or even only $350k) you probably won't have many of the other group to compare with (and all of the people whose names I'm thinking of are all great engineers)
---
* assuming we're talking total compensation.
That's fine--it's still a large number, and most roles simply don't pay it. There are, I'm sure, many openings that can pay sufficiently qualified people quite a lot of money, multiples of $350k. But it's a high number.
Really curious how it is air gapped commentators are able to intuit the real sequence others have adopted with so little information. That’s a pretty amazing power.
Maybe your company is known for paying well or well-enough, have you considered that?
> If your primary reason for responding to an ad is based upon salary you are not going to be happy where you work.
That's very debatable, and that's to say the least (and to say it politely).
For a lot of people a salary bump that eases financial pressure is a big boon on mental health, positivity and ultimately happiness.
And by the way, a lot of people will not be "happy" in the purest sense of the work at any job. Work is ultimately the chore we all do to exist. Maybe work is the ultimate chore.
We do our best to make the pill taste less sour, but very few of the people that do "code for passion" (or some other thing) would work on the same business related problem if they had no need for money. They would probably work on something else, which is very unlikely to overlap with some random jira ticket or something.
The OP also doesn't say that their "primary reason for responding to an ad is based upon salary"; they may also be filtering aggressively based on the industry, tech stack, role, etc, and also filtering based on salary.
It isn't just about the money, it's about the respect. Many, many people leave jobs because of the salary. Not just they need more money, but because they know they're worth more than that and can get it.
Those people are not going to bother looking at jobs that pay less than they're worth. They are absolutely going to look at the money first, and other benefits after. All those benefits matter, but money is the one that's forced their hand. And by extension, respect.
And, on a personal note, transparent wages are known to help break underpayment cycles where workers have been repeatedly underpaid and at each new opportunity their compensation is based on "Well what did you make in your previous job?" - a lack of pay transparency can end up giving people with social difficulties or who are of a visible minority much less take home. I want to work at a company where everyone is respected and valued because those companies are more successful in the long term. "Those who would give up company morale, to purchase a little temporary profit, deserve neither profits nor morale." - Benjamin Franklin (probably)
For example, I used to work in a SCIF for a government contractor in Northern Virginia, making 95k. No windows, no internet, no cell phone, no outside software without an approval process (had to manually burn linux packages to a CD, often multiple times a day because of dependencies).
Then I got a job at Amazon in their Austin location, essentially almost tripling my salary with the stock growth pre pandemic, with way better work environment, way easier work, but also with teammates with way less skill (after all, writing java web services isn't that hard)
So naturally, as my team and teams around us were hiring, to take advantage of the referral bonus, I contact all my old teammates, who would have easily aced the interview because they all had plenty of experience writing low level C code that was highly optimized, to suggest they apply.
Should be a no brainer, Austin had low cost of living back 5 years ago, no state income tax, your would be making way more, right?
Out of the 20 that I contacted, of them wanted to join. A lot of them were either single or with girlfriends, i.e without family, so relocation would not have been an issue. But they were perfectly content being way underpaid, living in a shitty area with high CoL. Still to this date don't know why. Seems like people value a certain things other than money.
Just because someone is single doesn't mean they don't have family and friends in the area. The further the move, the less contact they have with their existing social network. Not everyone is up for that, especially if you are moving a decent distance (like between states).
I feel some of it myself, so I can understand it, but it's crazy hard for so many people.
In a similar story, my father once told me, "People are always happy to pay you less than you are worth."
I don't really care about your promise because after many (too many?) years in business and seeing a lot of companies from the inside without any restrictions I can tell you that companies that paid at or above market rates generally had better work/life balance than the ones that did not and the people I spoke there definitely seemed substantially happier than in the places where they were paying below market rate.
In those places salary was usually just one indicator of many where incompetent management was showing through. Either you're a founder or you should make a very decent wage and anybody that tries to tell you that their crap salary is made up trough fringe benefits is taking advantage of you (or at least trying to do so). That you managed to trick some more qualified people into responding that otherwise would have rejected you out of hand is not a positive for them, it's a positive for you.
Employees can use a salary range to quickly weed out the employers to avoid from the ones to talk to and I would reverse your statement to 'If you are looking for a place that won't make you feel bad start with salary'.
This is bad analysis. Employees will already self-select based on pay.
I would bet you real money right now that if you polled employees as they left the company what their future salary is going to be, the majority will be making more.
> And... before you say, perhaps your salary ranges were bad, they weren't. Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit. In my opinion, salary is a sign of respect from you employer.
What's your hypothesis for why they performed worse? If I saw a listing for a job I wanted, for which I was qualified and had a salary range within my target, you'd better believe I'd apply for it. The Occam's Razor explanation is that the listed ranges were below more experienced candidates' expectations for the position.
I could see other things swaying stronger candidates away from applying to the jobs with salary ranges; it can be difficult to tell the distribution of salaries within the range, so perhaps they didn't want to risk being offered at the lower end of the range.
I bet 80% of companies would say they have above average salaries.
So, I am not just 'saying'. I have data. Careful research goes into making sure our employees are paid in pace or exceeding the market.
And turnover here is super high due to salary.
Every time I've encountered someone claiming they offered "aggressive" salaries, they were not in fact doing so.
Those who actually are offering aggressive salaries just put the number out there and let people decide for themselves.
And it might be true. E.g., they are all paying the same, and the remaining 20% are driving the average down.
You're conflating being happy at work and being happy to accept a job offer. You can be pretty well paid, and end up being not happy, and vice-versa.
If the offer is not good enough, the applicant won't accept it. What happens after you join a company doesn't have to be related to how much you get paid -- although it can be, sometimes.
Do you have hard, objective evidence to back this up? Very easy to imagine someone reading their personal biases into this observation.
Once I have a job, I’ve already agreed that the salary is adequate, or else I wouldn’t have accepted the job offer. So the salary isn’t going to be a factor for me one way or the other afterwards. But that’s a different question from whether salary is a factor before you go through the hiring process.
^ conflicts with:
> Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit.
Were these better candidates within the budgeted salary range though? Or were they priced too high?
I don't know man, if I got paid a metric *!&@ ton of money to do a really garbage job, I may very well be happy doing it for 12mo and building a big fat nest egg, or clearing major debt.
Many of us are willing to sacrifice QoL/workplace culture/etc. if the price is right. If we don't know the salary upfront, you're simply asking us to invest time and energy (and maybe even fall for a sunk cost situation) for the promise that we maybe guessed the magic number you could have told us out the gate. Not to mention if I'm talking to 2 companies I need all the information I can possibly get my hands on to make an informed decision.
We don't have to love our jobs. Some do, some don't. But you don't get to presume what motivates us or, better still, tell us our motivations are wrong. That's up to us to decide.
How did you measure better? Did you get the same number of responses for each?
Don't confuse "people" with "this person."
Oh ok.
This doesn't even touch on people who _have_ to prioritize salary.
Salary can be both a filter and a sorter.
- I won't apply to a job that pays less than I need to support the life style I want; no other factor can overcome that.
- I am more likely to apply for a job that pays more than a different job, but other things are also part of that sort.
It is entirely possible for salary to be an important part of what is considered when deciding on a job, even a deciding factor, without it being the only thing or even the primary thing.
I get where you are coming from, but at least here in Texas, a job with the title “Project Manager” can be a low-end job paying 50k to a senior position paying 250k or more. Salary is often the only way to tell them apart because the wording that recruiters use are typically identical (or very close to it).
Not sure if this is common or uncommon, but I wanted to share that sometimes these things are important for other reasons.
I don't care how nice the a place it is to work, I'm not applying to the $70k place. If I can't quickly figure out where you fall on that spectrum, I'm not going to bother to contact you because job listings are not rare. If you somehow manage to present as exactly the perfect place to work, I might contact you—to ask what the salary range is, and if you won't say up-front, I'm out.
It takes exactly one time sitting through interviews, having everyone be super excited about hiring you, then naming a totally normal rate when they ask what salary you're looking for, and watching everyone's faces turn green, to never, ever waste time doing that again. I've had mine already.
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
I can't say I hate my job but I have zero interest in it. Where as I had lots of <$100k jobs I loved. My life was better. I only get one life. I'd prefer to live a happy life than a well paid life. Right now I get paid well but my life feels like it's just bleeding away as a drone.
The biggest reason I haven't pulled the trigger is there's no guarntee that taking the $70k will actually be fun this time. I have my criteria for taking the jump though and if they're met I'd do it in a heartbeat.
For the standard 4-year vesting schedule, and assuming a new $350k grant every year, this means actual earnings are:
If you leave here, at year 4, and lose all unvested options (expected), your actual average was $281k/year.Only by year 5 you'll finally actually earn the $500k/year, and the vesting schedule has such an impact on the early earnings that even after a decade, your yearly average is still $400k.
Not to forget taxes. So the idea to "save for one year then take 6 years off" is kinda off the menu unless they've been at the company for a long, long time, or are willing to spend those 6 years living in Thailand.
Except now you have a 6 year gap on your resume to explain and probably a 6 year degradation of skills unless you're really disciplined.
That kind of freedom is normally only reserved for the kids of the very wealthy, and it opens up all kinds of opportunities.
False. I took five years to explore personal projects and then couldn’t get a callback to save my life. After landing a menial temp job, suddenly I got calls and interviews and landed a real job in no time. A huge gap can torpedo your efforts.
I think work is work, the more a workplaces tries to trick you into believing you're in a family or home environment they're not being clear on the work. Competency trumps all benefits.
Sure, if they could press a button and make more, they would, but in reality getting a higher salary requires to change jobs and they often have concerns about moving to a new place, doing something different, working with new people, wondering if they are going to like it or not, which ends up in them settling for a lower salary, especially if that salary covers everything they wanna do.
Often those thoughts are irrational, but thats how humans function.
But you're right, the 70k place might be just as much work, but they just don't make that much money, or any other series of situations.
500k requires you to live in San Francisco, commute to the office every day at strict hours and is at a soul crushing, bureaucratic big corp.
70k allows you to work from anywhere in the world, async an on your own schedule. Also, you get more vacation. 6k USD per month is a lot in many countries.
If you want to live now not later, I can see why you'd choose the 70k job.
i was stunned
This makes sense to me. The strongest engineers are those who really love the work and enjoy building software systems. They tend to have active software side projects outside of work. They tend to be the sort who want to be paid well, but prioritize places where they can learn new things, learn from others and be excited. They want to enjoy coming to work each day and grow as an engineer.
The engineers I know who are the most compensation-oriented, on the other hand, seem to think of work as mostly about the paychecks. They aren't bad engineers, but they don't seem to love the craft as much as the great engineers. If your relationship with the industry is transactional ("I write code and you give me money"), you rarely develop into a great software engineer
It doesn't surprise me that the strongest applicants are the ones who aren't prioritizing comp in the decision-making.
You may be right but I'm curious. I suspect that the issue is one of trust that the employer will adequately reward great code.
If I'm a jeweler, its very evident that I will get paid handsomely for the finest work, and I will get to work with the finest materials, creating a virtuous circle. It is not at all evident that this works in software. You dont get reliably comped better for creating better code.
In fact it's so bad that people publish code outside of their jobs to demonstrate to the next employer that they should have been comped better.
on that basis I can see why the transactional mindset takes hold. you want to treat me as a fungible disposable fixed price asset? then I will act like one, starting with a demand for the highest possible asset valuation.
I think this is the crux of the issue. Many companies invest quite heavily in improving engineers. My last company would send people to conferences, bring in consultants to train, have extended onboarding and training programs, and each engineer had a set budget for any training materials they wanted to purchase. They were absolutely not fungible or disposable. Other companies, I am sure, don't invest in their employees.
But perhaps this is just the system working: "mercenary" engineers will go work for the highest posted salary and will work at companies where they are treated as fungible and disposable. The "growth" engineers will go work at the companies where they can learn and grow and are invested in.
As long as both types of engineer make their way to the appropriate companies, the system works.
Look, it doesn't make sense to respond to ads for positions where there's no reasonable way that I'd accept the job based on comp.
For the most part, I've been an entrepreneur / my own boss. But I remember 2 interview processes where money was talked about too late (one for a consulting job, and one for a full time position) and the offer was abusively low. I think there was the hope that I would try to justify the sunk cost of the interviewing process by taking the deal.
There's a lot of talk that not posting ranges can contribute to discriminatory practices. I think this could be true -- I think of wife's experience as she was entering the workforce. She was president of the mech-eng honor society, magna cum laude from a highly ranked university, with better work experience than most graduates. Multiple employers gave her absurdly lowball offers after she interviewed-- literally half of the average going rate for new grads-- perhaps mistaking her warmness for being willing to roll over and not negotiate. (She ultimately got a gig in the upper quartile).
P.S. Now I make about 3-6% of what I could make elsewhere-- I'm a middle school teacher. There was no need to surprise me with the number at the end to get me to take this offer. Salary isn't the end-all, be-all, but keeping it opaque concentrates too much power with the employer and that power is often used for dubious ends.
Paying far below the market doesn't necessarily make you a worse or better place to work for... but typically while salary won't improve how things go in a company... they are a core reason why I am even there...
Like... The comfort and performance of a car will not be affected by the price. I can love a certain car, even if it is cheaper or 20k over what it should cost. That won't matter. But I won't buy the car if I am not comfortable paying for it. The car would be just as great, but if it was out of my price range, I am still suffering for it.
Now cars are priced relatively close to their actual worth, and all car prices are well known vs hidden behind 7 hours of interviews and "don't talk about your salary" policies. So this is the playing field we're creating with salaries being up-front.
I have turned down many job interviews because I said my salary requirements during our opening call. Sure it wasn't part of the posting, but it better be an early conversation otherwise why would I leave a comfortable job for a lower pay?
When people respond to online job postings, it is often because they are already really unhappy, or need a job because they lost theirs, so the numbers may be skewed due to needs.
So what is my point? idk... probably recruiter outreach should have salary info. For job postings... my bet is recruiters know response rates better than I do. :P
Edit: Post interviews, I have taken lower paying job offers compared to other offers because after talking to the teams I predicted the money was worth losing over happiness. So money is certainly isn't everything, but it is an important aspect. I assure you I will deal with extra stress for 500k because I know at home I'll get the support needed and the extra money will change our lives. But would I do the same for 10k? hell no.
If cultural fit and believing in your mission is the most important thing, then just hire people who are really good at that
Good sample size. This probably tells us that there isn't much difference posting salary and the people applying to each. This may be unsurprising since not posting salaries is already the norm.
> better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges
I have a feeling that this is a particularly low (and highly noisy) sample.
I think you are overstating the significance of your results.
This never get's any less ridiculous the more it is repeated. It's like some sort of stockholm syndrome thing.
I'm responding to a JOB ad, the thing where you trade your time for money. There are many criteria I use to decide if I'll be happy somewhere besides money, but they are all irrelevant if I'm not properly paid because, you know, that's why I'm taking a salary job instead of doing my own thing.
It's funny how no one makes the same advice on the other side. Oh yeah, this person is incompetent, but it's not really about the work right? We are a big family, let's make him a VP because he's really fun to get a beer with.
The same logic also never seems to apply when security is escorting you out because of layoffs and treating you like a criminal. (never happened to me personally but it surely happens to A LOT of people. Like 10s of thousands in the last month)
I'd still apply to a unicorn, or a company who I know just raised $20M,because I know they can afford it and already pay at/above market.
Salary is not the primary reason, it's a bare minimum requirement, and if it's not completely obvious that the company is willing to pay enough, I won't click on it, let alone apply.
> with the better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges.
They responded but did the better candidates accept an offer and work for you now?
Underpaying employees is a clear sign that a company tries to exploit them. So it creeps in work life balance, unlimited responsibilities, abusive management etc
It is also a clear sign that they do not value the work that these employees are doing.
So if a company pays pennies for example for ML engineers, you know that they don’t have vision to grow there, they are just checking boxes.
On the other hand if employees are greatly compensated that means that the company is looking for the greatest talent out there, so they are seriously invested in the area, aka you have good potential to grow.
Also companies that compensate great have no incentive to abuse their super stars. Exactly because they have invested a lot.
So money is the first and only measurable criterion to reject an employer before even finishing the interview loops.
Tell us the numbers. Otherwise I call bullshit…
I just have a salary range I am aiming for, especially because I compare it to my current job where I have a permanent contract. Like the OP said, it's super annoying to go through the process and then get a low-ball offer.
I recently turned down a job at a very big company for that reason. When I said no they said it's a really good career move working for them and I would rise up fast. They have candidates begging to work there. But no I'm not taking less than I'm getting right now (after standards of living correction)
You're concealing relevant information in order to sucker in people who have no interest. It's the central mechanism behind "linkbait" headlines. It's just a dark pattern.
People who were not interested in a job with your salary range responded to ads that omitted the salary range. They heard you out because they had already committed their time to reach out to you. This basically shifts hiring costs onto the applicants in that they have to waste their time discussing a job they would never take because you held back the information they needed to know that it was a job they would never take.
Somehow, you've found a way to rationalize this as passion.
But he said he got better candidates with the ad that didn't post salary ranges. If I understand your analogy, that's like (counterintuitively) getting more responses for the expired milk.
The better question is were they able to hire any of those better candidates after they told them that the milk was expired?
One way you might see that effect is if both candidates who are good fits for the role and candidates who are bad fits for the role apply more often when a high salary is posted, but the number of bad fits increases faster than the number of good fits (e.g. because there is some subset of people who will send their application to every role that pays over a certain threshold whether or not they are qualified).
If it's sufficiently costly to distinguish qualified from unqualified candidates, the company might be better off not showing a salary range, even accounting for how it causes good people not to apply. That approach does feel like an inelegant hack to get around their inability to easily tell whether someone would actually perform well in the role though, so addressing that root cause would be better in that scenario if they could figure out how to do it.
When you put a range of $100-120k, the very high quality candidate who won't accept an offer less than $150k doesn't apply.
Or, put another way:
> It could simultaneously be true that including a good salary range increases the number of applicants who are good fits for the role, and also true that including a good salary range decreases the average quality of candidates.
Part of "good fit" could be "willingness to accept compensation in range". If the job range says $10/hr, the average quality of applicants will go down because the MIT Ph.D.'s won't apply-- but you weren't going to hire them at $10/hr anyways.
(Especially since it's only a problem if the higher pay motivates more bad applicants that are hard to distinguish from good applicants. If it encourages 100 people who have no relevant experience to apply, that brings the average down, but it doesn't increase the probability of making a bad hire.)
> Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit
Your example covers the case of "mid-range salary", overqualified applicant doesn't want the job, but wasn't going to get hired anyways because overqualified. Parent's example covers "very high salary", underqualified applicant wants the job just because the number is high. Given the "salary offerings are very aggressive", then why would we be talking about a "mid-range salary" case.
The ones that actually pay top of market rate I reach out to, not the other way around.
> The ads performed equally well in regard to total responses with the better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges
He did, and that raises a lot of questions:
Were the ads identical otherwise?
Were the salaries actually competitive or did he just think they were?
Did any of these better candidates actually accept an offer?
I want money so my family don’t struggle in the future. My child can go to better schools. We have better food. We can have a house at better places. When you only work to pay your bills you gonna have a bad time. What happens when you get fired? What happens when you want to change your perspective and go to school again.
Assuming you're discussing engineering roles, this is a dangerous attitude.
Engineering is an economic force multiplier; meaning, the monetary value of the results is worth many multiples of the monetary value of the engineering labor put in.
Seeking a fair salary upfront ensures a few things. One of the most important is the value of the result of the labor. As a top software engineer; I only want to work on products that are significantly valuable. (And then I want my fair share of the profits, too.)
This is true, but at the same time, if you're trying to hire people for $X, and I currently make $3X or more, it is probably not worthwhile for us to spend much time exploring working together.
For the most part, I can tell whether you're likely to be vaguely close based on discussing the role with you. It's a bit of a signaling game, but I can usually tell if we're at least kinda-sorta close -- but at the same time I've definitely gotten well into the process with folks only to discover that we're so far apart that it doesn't matter what the role or company is like.
Let's see your salary range numbers and what tier you fall under.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
Are you in Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3?
Are you paying your mid-level engs over $200k total when including stock and bonus? That's the minimum benchmark I would use for my next job hunt. 120k+ for juniors, 200k+ for mid, 300k+ for senior, 400k+ for anything above senior.
What I'm willing to do, however, is a whole bunch of stuff, as long as that "stuff" gives me a better ability to do those things that do make me happy, and a primary driver of my ability to do the things I like is how much money I have.
Happiness doesn't really factor into it, because as I said, the items at the top of the list of things that make me happy are nonstarters from an income perspective.
It's delusional, as an employer, to think your job is to make the people who work for you "happy" in some objective sense.
Nobody would be there if you weren't paying them, you need very badly to remind yourself of that.
I'm not. Work is work. It's how I pay for my life. I want a job that doesn't make me miserable, and is constrained to ~40 hours per week -- but "enjoy" isn't the goal.
Making the maximum amount of money for my labor is the goal. (Without doing things that go against my ethics, or are illegal. I could make more if I had no ethical boundaries, I'm sure.) I have a family, a mortgage, pets with expensive vet needs, and a limited number of years left in my career. "Enjoyment" doesn't pay the bills, supply health coverage to my dependents or put money in the bank to cushion any economic downturns, etc.
I wish I'd had this attitude starting in my early 30s. I wouldn't be working now at all and could actually do things I enjoy with all my time and not just a sliver of it.
Your experiment is not valid because you are not controlling for the job market environment. However as the job market environment evolves to offer more data, the job postings with less data will suffer.
We already see this pattern in other markets such as housing/cars. More information makes the posting more attractive to the extent that there is whole industries dedicated to offering more information about postings, ex: carfax. The job market is not different.
Otherwise we (Me and the recruiter) both end up wasting each other's time once I find out the salary is below market value. Honesty is key, positive company culture should be a common expectation in all roles, it's not worth sacrificing income for in my opinion.
One of the best career moves I can make is to ensure I am being paid properly for every job I accept. The most defeating experience is accepting a job that pays under market standard when roles and responsibilities are always guaranteed to increase and often become overburdening without overtime... I also live in an "At will" state, and that makes employers pretty careless about retaining me when their budgets on other projects suffer.
As a senior employee who has done everything from Development to Architecture to Proposals to Project Management, Companies often try to seek advantage for hiring me at a lower rate for just one of those skills, but then often pile on the other roles and work hard to tap my experience/knowledge/contacts for free... In cases like that, a company becomes one in the same as an employee that lied on their resume.
It's akin to being on a dating site... We all need to stop wasting each other's time and find the right matches that are well suited to each job. Listing salary is like a suitor listing their age on their dating profile... Pretty essential every time.
Either way, it feels questionable to draw much signal from the process.
I work to live, not live to work.
I expect some excitement from my work but in the end it is just work. I work 8 hours and they pay me for that. I think having that personal attachment to your work and expecting more from it leads to early burn out when things are not going great
It’s true that if you love your job, it may be hard when it’s not going great.
It's not really clear what "primary" means here. It's certainly one of my primary concerns.
> Of the top reasons people are happy at work, salary is way down on the list.
Okay, but that doesn't mean that if the salary were zero they would take the job. It just means that they have enough options within their acceptable salary range that they also considered other factors.
Asking whether salary is the primary reason for choosing a job is a bit like asking if width is the primary reason for choosing a storage unit.
Put another way, I'd rather work somewhere that's investing heavily in tech talent and also has good market fit. Stock tends to go up at places like that, so it had better be a big chunk of the offer. This makes total comp impossible to predict, and therefore hard to put in a single number.
So they would have rejected your offer... or are you hoping to reel them in with the sunken cost fallacy?
"Meaning, if you are looking for a place you will enjoy working, do not start with salary." Are you suggesting people go through multiple rounds of interviews with no idea of what the salary is for the position? Of course you start with salary otherwise everyone is just wasting their time. If the company does not want to discuss salary up front then there is probably a pretty good reason for that and it's not a place I want to work as this trend would likely continue come raise and promotion time as well. It's the same companies demanding loyalty and offering none.
You just went though the cycle and already think you know which are the better candidates. But we all know that performance is measured by doing the work.
It's a fun idea thou. Perhaps others can follow the example and we may gather meaningful data.
Interview loops are an enormous investment of time these days. I'm not going to take one unless I'm confident the offer will come out in an acceptable range.
Maybe you can fool some people with less experience or market power by not giving them the comp info upfront. But not the best.
And don't be surprised when any truly talented folks among your hires leave much earlier than you hoped. Karma.
People work for money, plain and simple. If the salary is not there people walk. Period. This is more than just "pay the bills" but Pay the Bills + Savings + retirement + Kids + hobbies + etc.
10 years ago the "magic number" where salary started to become less important was 75K, today (and I have not seen the research) but my guess that is closer to 100-120K before your idea of "salary is not the most important thing" comes into play, even then though it will be in the top 5 until you are well in the 1 percent category which is 400-500K +
1. They get to contribute more to the success of the company
2. What they built typically has real users
3. They are valued and get paid commensurately with the near infinite leverage they bring to the company.
4. They get to work with other like minded software engineers.
5. There is probably an established career path for them if they perform well.
Good engineers typically ALREADY work at a place they enjoy. The market is too competitive for good talent to put up with any BS whatsoever. You are trying to get them to leave a good place for another hopefully better place. However, there is risk because they don't know your company/have to trust you a bit. You MUST compensate for this risk.
My risk premium is easily a 25-50% salary increase. Which means I need a job to pay about $100-200k more or have significant high probability upside (IPO etc.) for me to jump all else equal (passion products maybe an exception).
If you waste my time with a job ad that doesn't tell me up front what to expect I will:
1. Not accept your interview request or offer.
2. Will flame your company throughout my entire network.
Also if you want me to do a "take home" anything that will be $500/hr with a max of 4 hours spent.
Generally when you get people for whom salary is way down on the list, you get morons. But I think you are indeed looking for morons. So your strategy will work.
Candidates is a red herring. What was the quality of the actual hires from one branch versus the other?
I’ll regularly take specific language from a job posting and search on it to see what information is where.
The issue is the companies out there with low salary ranges. And while it's absolutely true that a high salary isn't going to make an otherwise bad job great, too low a salary will make an otherwise great job terrible.
So I'm not really surprised that your company wouldn't see much value from publishing salary ranges, but I don't think that means they have no value.
Also on a side note:
> Of the top reasons people are happy at work, salary is way down on the list.
That's a weird link to give as evidence of that, since it immediately covers two different surveys that found compensation was the number 1 factor, before going on to discuss a third survey that found it was important, just not #1...
The problem is that no one wants to apply to a job where the salary isn’t viable for them.
Amongst the 50 other things they don’t know about a role and company, most of them you need to talk about in an interview, but item #1: salary, is make or break, and can be answered before even applying.
It’s disrespectful to candidates not to put a range on the ad.
Absolutely.
But when considering a new role, I don't work there yet. It'll take a lot of research and talking to people to try to figure out if the working conditions are good or not. I don't want to spend that effort if it turns out you'll pay less than half what I make now. So I'll need to talk about comp on the first conversation with a recruiter.
It was a waste of everyone's time. Providing salary information isn't about finding the ideal place but filtering out the places that aren't in the same ballpark.
We decided to screen applicants in an informal phone call and discuss salary options at the end, after they had a first impression of how we are as a firm.
We have another vacant position soon, I might try it.
I would caution you against the "willing to sacrifice parts of their salary for 100% remote, flexible work time, PTO and others." mindset though. 100% remote, flexible work time, PTO, and other benefits are not added bonuses at this point: they are the minimum requirements for many positions/prospective employees. Instead, focus on the selling the qualities of your workplace that make people happy to work there (for instance, work/life balance, no red tape/micromanagement, creative freedom on solutions, interesting problems to solve, etc).
You think you're hot shit on a silver platter. You apply for jobs with high TC listed and others which you believe will also be high TC based on... reasons, even though they don't list their salary ranges.
You get callbacks from some of the high TC positions you applied for. You also get callbacks from the non-listed salary positions. Cool. None of the highest, none of your first choices, but whatever, an interview is an interview.
You go through the processed and find out a lot of the non-listed positions have TCs much lower than you were hoping for. TCs so low, you wouldn't have considered the job if you had known. Whatever, you'll just ghost them. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
But then the days stretch on and the only positions submitting offers are the low TC jobs you applied for. You take the blow to your ego along with the job. Gotta pay those bills.
Like I said, it's just a possible scenario where I can see how not posting their range could get them more applicants.
People would who are not prepared to make that trade off will skip you and you’ll be left with people that are.
There have been times where I’d have been ok with that trade off but would have skipped over you for not making the salary clear.
The first impression of how you are as a firm is the job ad, and if you don't post a salary the first impression is worse.
Given how much more common this is now across all white collar work, do you find your company less competitive?
Some people just want money; hoard it like a dragon, invest, retire early. Others are perfectly fine with earning less if they can live better lives in exchange. After all, what's a huge pay check worth if you can't enjoy your hard-earned money in the prime of your life? Or perhaps the dev has a family and prefers spending time with their kids? You can still make money later in life, but your kids' life milestones are irreplaceable.
Posting a lower salary position may attract different people (i.e. people who value their private life more than the money) but that's not necessarily a bad thing. With enough experience, someone can always get more money elsewhere; their employment may only last until the second a better job offer comes in. People who value the additional benefits more are less likely to get them at other companies, as the market is aimed at making the most money right now, so I'd expect them to stick around longer and have more of a vested interest in the success of your company.
You may miss out on top players who want to see their money's worth, but if your package is as good as you say it is, I don't see why you wouldn't post your salary ranges. Focus the ad on what makes the job great and add the range for transparency and I'm sure you'll find the right people.
Some people say this reduces your negotiating leverage because it reveals your hand too much. I try to get around this by making clear it's a minimum, not a maximum, and anything other than stellar equity/benefits/WLB will require even higher base
I tell them exactly what number I'm looking for. Saves everybody a bunch of time. Yes, my current job I got what I asked for.
"The equity/benefits/WLB you describe aren't consistent with what I was expecting. I'll need higher base if this is going to work."
Salary is not the only part of a compensation package. If other parts of the package pencil out, great, if not, you're within your right to ask for more salary. Some employers have more flexibility on salary, others might be more flexible in other areas.
This is a very common negotiating technique; if you can't reach agreement on one point, expand the negotiating space.
Anyone who would be offended by the above worth working with anyway.
> There's no positive way to spin that. You look like an ass and are negotiating from weakness.
If you think negotiation is about what party can project dominance the most, you don't have a clue about negotiation. You're not haggling for cab fare, you're establishing the terms of a relationship that will continue for years if things go well, and in those situations you want to be collaborative rather than adversarial. This will pay dividends down the road.
Or just ask for the range without discussing your requirement. I've never had a recruiter or hiring manager who balked when I turned the question around. If the numbers are favorable, I just say, "If it doesn't work out, it won't be a numbers issue." If not, I say, "That really isn't in the range I'm looking for, and I don't think it'd be in our mutual interest to pursue this opportunity."
The former response preserves an opportunity for later negotiation if the interviewing process goes well.
I am a short man, and I have firsthand experience in this by posting my height on my dating profile. I got fewer matches when I did, but those who matched after were always way better dates!
If you pay well, they will come.
I can see significant strains in hiring because of this cultural backward thinking. If you don't list your salary range, you simply won't get applicants other than the truly desperate.
If you don't offer a competitive market rate you are not going to find quality people or very motivated workers.
It's no surprise that Canada has massive brain drain, especially in the West Coast. Those that stay, like to gaslight and come up with a dozen reasons why a haircut is justified to live in the warm part of Canada.
In the long run, Canada is absolutely going to lose relevancy economically. 1 out of 5 immigrants leave in the first 4 years, record number of Canadians/PR are leaving Canada permanently.
Especially noticeable with the whole cloud + microservices + event queue craze, since very few companies do anything with this yet, so few people actually accrue the knowledge they require, and most projects where the benefits of these shine are not projects individuals will tend to pick up.
Yet I still see K8 positions without salary expectations. I wonder if companies will be able to afford the upkeep with these shops that hopped on the K8 wagon early before serverless was a thing.
> In Canada, there is this weird faux pas where asking for market rate gets you flagged for a position that requires in reality less than 4 years of experience require significantly more as it is very much still a employer's market.