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Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#301

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

kuboble wrote: post #127
indymike wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are some comments in here that verge on assuming bad faith on the part of the companies involved Not disclosing pay is illegal in three states in the US, and has the practical effect of reducing the number of applicants to the advertised job by 14%, so it's self-harming for the employer anyway. Bonus: a lot of job boards will just plug an "estimated salary" in for you to max their CTR and revenue on syndicatio…

Are the companies indeed inflicting self harm? They might get less applications that way, but posting salary ranges for new employees has other downsides - e.g. it might tilt existing employees. Another downside is that it's easy to scrap and collect this data and companies might not like candidates or employees easily accessing historical data. Sharing salary range basically reduces the knowledge advantage of a comp…

> but posting salary ranges for new employees has other downsides - e.g. it might tilt existing employees.

Fucking good.

It's absolutely scummy to secretly pay new hires more than your experienced existing employees.

It's also extremely short-sighted. You'd rather deal with attrition costs of losing a trained, experienced employee and having to find new candidates and train someone new, than to just give your current employees the pay raise they obviously deserve?

> Sharing salary range basically reduces the knowledge advantage of a company in many ways.

That's the fucking point.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#302

Post by shanebellone »

gregjor wrote: post #274
pixl97 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so heavily invested in this accusation? HN is completely capable of responding to any accusations properly.

I have invested exactly as much in this thread as you and everyone else have. I don't have any investment in the topic. I don't care if companies post salaries in their job postings. I just pointed out that the OP made a couple of accusations, including the implication that YC was allowing their companies to break the law in HN job postings. OP did not provide any examples. > HN is completely capable of responding to…

I don't understand how you can say this: "without any supporting facts"

Your comments sound angry, defensive, and accusatory.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#303

Post by 1attice »

dang wrote: post #295
roflyear wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still misleading. It now implies it is only a NYC issue and that all NYC companies are at fault.

Ok, I've tried once more—this time taking out NYC and taking out the implication that all YC companies are at fault. Is this better?

Yes, but one last quibble.

Technically, in the phrase "YC startups are breaking the law", there is no clear implication that it is all YC startups.

The phrase simply does not speak on the point of quantity, and is pretty decent 'headline English', which traditionally does away with 'some', 'the', etc, trading specificity for celerity.

However, with the phrasing 'Some YC startups are breaking the law", there is actually additional information being added. Intentionally or not, dang is injecting into the discourse a self-protective disclaimer.

If you're really curious, one can probably work out a symbolic representation of the truth claim being made in any higher-order logic that can express Vagueness (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/) and demonstrate how the truth functions differ, but frankly I'm not a grad student anymore, and I'm less excited to do free symbolic logic problems ;D

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#304

Post by 1attice »

dang wrote: post #295
roflyear wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still misleading. It now implies it is only a NYC issue and that all NYC companies are at fault.

Ok, I've tried once more—this time taking out NYC and taking out the implication that all YC companies are at fault. Is this better?

Oh, one more thing.

Popping the devtools on my brain, I think the reason this issue jumped out at me in the first place is that YC's moral ground has shifted lately, mostly because of its exposure to blockchain bets, many of which turned out to be, how to put this politely, more valuable than worthy.

In this new climate, it's impossible for me not to pay close attention to how organizations shield themselves from reputational risk.

It might be advisable to HN to come up with some self-regulatory editorial policies and guidelines to prevent unintentional conflicts-of-interest.

For example, if it turned out that HN was being used to systematically privilege coverage of its friends, allies, and clients, that would have reputational impact on the publication going forward.

I don't think that's what's intentionally going on here, but I also feel we've seen just how fraught the act of edition actually is.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#305

Post by dang »

1attice wrote: post #303
dang wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I've tried once more—this time taking out NYC and taking out the implication that all YC companies are at fault. Is this better?

Yes, but one last quibble. Technically, in the phrase "YC startups are breaking the law", there is no clear implication that it is all YC startups. The phrase simply does not speak on the point of quantity, and is pretty decent 'headline English', which traditionally does away with 'some', 'the', etc, trading specificity for celerity. However, with the phrasing 'Some YC startups are breaking the law", there is actual…

Now we've reached a deadlock, since as far as I can tell, your interpretation and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976153 are incompatible.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#306

Post by dang »

1attice wrote: post #304
dang wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I've tried once more—this time taking out NYC and taking out the implication that all YC companies are at fault. Is this better?

Oh, one more thing. Popping the devtools on my brain, I think the reason this issue jumped out at me in the first place is that YC's moral ground has shifted lately, mostly because of its exposure to blockchain bets, many of which turned out to be, how to put this politely, more valuable than worthy. In this new climate, it's impossible for me not to pay close attention to how organizations shield themselves from rep…

It's fraught, but from my perspective it's no more fraught than it used to be. The very first thing pg told me about moderating HN (before I even had time to grab a chair) was not to suppress anti-YC stories. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... has years worth of these cases, and there have been masses of others. I think the editorial policy is pretty clear (I've outlined it in this thread, and many other comments reachable through that HN Search link); it's also been stable for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#307

Post by falcolas »

gregjor wrote: post #287
falcolas wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, if someone can't comply with the laws they're subject to (or more accurately bother to look up the laws they need to comply with), they shouldn't be trying to run a business. It's literally their job as a business owner, and millions of people successfully do this every year.

I can guarantee that every single business fails to comply with many laws. No one can know every law that might apply to them. A startup in California advertising a remote job that they hire a New Yorker for now has to comply with NYC laws. At best you can try to keep up with, understand, and comply with the most important and well-known laws. But you don't find out your toilets aren't ADA compliant or your storage s…

> It's simply not practical to "look up the laws they need to comply with."

If that's the case where you're incorporated and operating, specialists in what the law says and how it applies exists. Use some of that VC money to use them.

That said, your examples are pretty terrible. ADA rules for buildings are incredibly clear, and a halfway decent contractor will know them. Ditto fire rules. Seriously, a business owner with a shed that hurts or kills somebody for not being compliant with fire codes deserves their day in court.

Oh, and the usual "Ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law" applies here too.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#308

Post by grepLeigh »

tomhallett wrote: post #249
mywittyname wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CEO eventually has to develop the courage to deliver bad news to the board.

100% agreed, but for the CEO's who are making the above mistake, if they have other bad news to deliver to the board (low revenues, etc), then they might be afraid to deliver yet another piece of bad news on the hiring side.

Yep, and a mis-hire is one of the easiest problems to push off. You can talk yourself into believing the first project wasn't a good fit, your management skills aren't good so it's your fault, and so on.

All of those things might even be true! But doesn't change the reality that you're burning 2-3 engineers of runway on 1 engineer with no valuable outputs.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#309

Post by AdrianB1 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #97
indymike wrote: post #78

I've been in the job board / HR Tech space for a while, and every time I see a state pass a law requiring advertising the salary range, I'm reminded of a few facts: * Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads. * If you don't give the job board a salary range, they will use tools like salary.com or their own tools to sh…

> * If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later. My experience with being hired at non-FAANG places over a career of more than two decades is that I'm usually through a process and h…

I work in such a company; it is easy to hire, there are people that FAANG does not hire, other companies don't hire, but somewhere at the bottom someone does. The entire industry that I work in (non-IT, but very large companies) do this, it is the practice for the past ~ 15 years and there is a non-compete agreement on this.

Re: Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

#310

Post by tptacek »

jacquesm wrote: post #300
roflyear wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for going off. Inappropriate on my part.

Did you consider mailing Dan about this issue before making it an 'Ask HN' post?

This whole thing is pretty silly, right? The penalties for noncompliance with NYC's law apply to the listing company, not to the board they posted on. If you really think YC companies are deliberately skirting the law, report them to NYC.

NYC does a one-time 90-day notice-and-cure, so you can "effect positive change" with listing YC companies without subjecting them to fines, if that's really what you're worried about.

I don't see what this has to do with HN, at all.

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