Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

news.ycombinator.com

351–360 of 544 posts

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#351

We just went through a large hiring cycle. We posted two versions for every job posting- one with salary ranges and one without. 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,…

My father once told me that money is how the company tells you how much they value you. 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…

There is a lot more complexity to this.

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.

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What's your hypothesis for why they performed worse? If I saw a listing for a…

Wouldn't the test of that question be whether they were able to hire the stronger candidates within the listed salary range? 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.

Sure, but I think "the lower end of the range is too low" is basically equivalent to "the salary range is bad".

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. (4 year experience job requires now 8~10 year exp without the salary to reflect this) I can see significant strains in hiring because of this cultural backward thinking. If you don't list y…

Not unique to Canada at all, FWIW. Demanding top level skills while paying market rate at best has been going on for years now. Employers just don't want to change, and a lot of candidates are still accepting the circumstances. 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, an…

what are you seeing right now with the whole cloud/MS/CQRS scene? Seems like after serverless took off more companies are pondering whether they need kubernetes at all.

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.

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#354

We just went through a large hiring cycle. We posted two versions for every job posting- one with salary ranges and one without. 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,…

If the posted salary is too high I'll probably assume it's a scam or you plan on doing a bait and switch anyway :)

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#355
I think this is excellent progress (posting ranges) and I've made a habit of always telling candidates I'm interviewing right up front what the range is so that I don't waste their time (or mine!). It really is just good business.

That said, I want to make an observation here on this part of the comment by Carrok:

> 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.

This is indeed a feature, but there is a trap here as well. I have watched a number of engineers who join a company that gives annual raises. They stay at that company for > 10 years and their salary is very comfortable for them. Then they decide to change jobs and the salary range for their current role with no history at the company is significantly less than they are currently making.

As you get more senior experienced, it is important to consider that there are two components of your "worth"; The skills you bring to the job is kind of your intrinsic value, and the knowledge of how to get things done at this company is a value "add-on." You lose that add-on when you start at a new company.

If you've been hopping from job to job every couple of years that won't be a significant issue for you but if you've been somewhere for 5+ years it could be, so keep that in mind while looking around.

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#356

Complicating things here is the fact companies like Amazon top up their compensation with stock grants (or maybe ISOs, it's been a while since I worked there.) So you see a job offer from Amazon that says the salary range for a SDE I is $85k-$160k, but I'm pretty sure they would low-ball you on salary but give you a stock grant that might be worth $80k over 4 years if AMZN stock holds its value. I think my point is..…

It's even worse when you realize most of that stock is paid in years 3-4 whereas a lot of people don't last past year 2

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#357

We just went through a large hiring cycle. We posted two versions for every job posting- one with salary ranges and one without. 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,…

Sorry, no. I have bills to pay. If your role means taking a 50% pay cut, I'm just not interested. I don't want to waste multiple days of PTO to interview just so you can give me a number that is entirely unacceptable for my experience, expectations, and skill level. The most amazing role in the world would get the same response if I can't support my family.

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#358
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I'm considering the $70k place where as right now I have the $500k total comp. I can't say I hate my job but I have zero interest in it. Where as I had lots of 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.

I've found lower paying jobs typically treat you worse but YMMV.

Yep, funny how that goes but it's true.

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think this is true, and might even be willing to go through the motions for the money, but if I expect you to truly love what you do and look for ways to improve the quality and throughput of your manure handling operations the money is not a good indicator or motivator.

> You think this is true, and might even be willing to go through the motions 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.

I'm sure Amazon HR has a lot of data on this question.

Re: Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

#360
post #256

More anecdotal evidence: a few years back I wanted to get out of the work situation I was in. I looked around, had some interviews, had some offers. None of the postings had salary ranges, as is common where I live. My eyes, however, were set on a specific small company because I liked their product. The process was long and involved multiple meetings, a take-home problem, and stretched over 2 or so months. I was upf…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN