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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?

#261

Post by janalsncm »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #169
xnorswap wrote: post #48

To those who think it's not YC / HN's problem, you're missing that HN literally has a Job Board: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs This is a core part of their offering, it's not just user generated content, it's YC companies posting on YC's job board.

OP is likely referring to the "Who is Hiring?" posts. Those offerings are user-generated and likely fall under Section 230. Even if that weren't the case, New York City has no juridiction over a company's speech in the Bay Area.

Unless you are a lawyer it does not seem prudent to err on the side of “don’t worry about it” when it comes to the law. I’m also not a lawyer but this is the kind of thing companies get slapped with fines for all the time.

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

#262

Post by warrenm »

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.

Related: apply to jobs during [earlyish] business hours whenever possible - you're a lot more likely to hear back in a timely manner

Don't apply at 9pm on Friday night if you can avoid it

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

#263

Post by xpe »

swiftcoder wrote: post #258
yamtaddle wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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…

Even FAANGs can pull this off. Amazon was routinely hiring folks in single-day loop with offer letter the following morning, back when I joined.

Likely you had a very particular set of (in-demand) skills. Right? What year was this?

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

#264

Post by _tom_ »

wintogreen74 wrote: post #189
indymike wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely hire developers in 24 hours from initial contact. It's fun watching them get random recruiter calls two or three weeks later. "I'm not interested, I STARTED my new job three weeks ago. No, I'm not willing to leave for that. Have a nice day." Except the "Have a nice day" part is usually less friendly and polite.

How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time? I was hired by my current employer in less than 2 weeks from initial conversation and it was a bit of a smell that they weren't more thorough. Now I'm a hiring manager and am a little concerned with what I feel are "loose" practices that let too many marginal candidates through because otherwise "it's too hard to source talent". For me…

> How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time?

There is little evidence that longer interview cycles produce better results.

"Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship."

- https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

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

#265

Post by dang »

wyldfire wrote: post #257
dang wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I explained the title change here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33974170 . I think you make a good point though, so I've edited it again. For those curious, the originally submitted title was " Ask HN: Why are YC companies breaking hiring laws? " and the first edit was " Ask HN: Why are YC companies hiring in NYC not posting their salary range? I've just edited it a second time, to " Ask HN: Why are YC compan…

> "Ask HN: Why are YC companies in NYC posting their salary range, as law requires?" Is that the right polarity? I think the question was/should be why "aren't" they posting it. Right? Or do I totally misunderstand?

Yikes, that was a typo. Sorry! Now I have to figure out how to squeeze 'not' in there without going over 80 chars.

Edit: ok, fixed now.

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

#266

Post by id00 »

hellweaver666 wrote: post #229
indymike wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely hire developers in 24 hours from initial contact. It's fun watching them get random recruiter calls two or three weeks later. "I'm not interested, I STARTED my new job three weeks ago. No, I'm not willing to leave for that. Have a nice day." Except the "Have a nice day" part is usually less friendly and polite.

In most small companies you send in your CV, they bring you in for an interview, chat for an hour or so and get an offer the next day. The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.

> The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.

This is a very detached view from the reality. The only reason for the company to spend that much time on the interview process is to reduce the rate of "false positives" as it's deemed very expensive at the big tech. Avoiding individual accountability is not the reason

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

#267

Post by dang »

braingenious wrote: post #254
dang wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I changed the title as part of moderating this thread less than we normally would. We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or YC startups are part of the story—this has been established practice since the beginning: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... . The way we'd normally moderate a thread like this is by downweighting it as a generic riler-upper ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRan…

That was a lot of words. The “minimum” reasonable thing to do would have been to leave the thread alone if it is in fact your policy to moderate YC threads less than usual. Can you point to some non-YC posts that you have explicitly removed references to breaking the law from? It is, in fact, breaking the law to list NYC jobs without providing salary range in the same way that it is breaking the law to jaywalk or pis…

I admit it was a lot of words, but I believe that lot of words already answered most of your points. As for the rest...I generally haven't found it to be a good use of time to answer that sort of cross-examination. The bulk of the community seems quite happy when we explain our thinking in good faith and don't do anything too extreme, but the cross-examiner is usually impossible to satisfy. I'm not talking about you here! but in my past experience, patiently answering a cross-examination usually only produces a longer cross-examination. I'd rather spend those resources making HN better for the rest of the community.

But you did get me curious to see if I could find a past example of this kind of title edit. I did find one from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30680267. We changed "Google Fi Illegally Bricked My iPhone 11 Pro Max" to "Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)" That's a typical example of HN moderation because we not only took out the sensational/disputable word, we also added the year—which besides being a normal edit, has the side effect of damping the riler-upper aspect. (The internet only likes to get angry about fresh things.)

Re the Tiktok bit, you seem to be asking about this post: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 - Dec 2021. I couldn't find any record of us moderating that post, so my first thought was that perhaps we just didn't see it. But I commented several times in the thread, so that can't be it either. Given that https://twitter.com/Naaackers/status/1471494415306788870 was exactly the sort of riler-upper that we routinely downweight, and in this case neglected to, my guess is that I was too busy in the comments and forgot to look at the article.

In a case like that, it would be normal to add a question mark as a way of making the title more neutral. We did that, for example, here: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33343681 - Oct 2022 (246 comments)

Now I have added another lot of words. I hope some of this is useful!

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

#268

Post by sbrother »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #253
xyzelement wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for your friend but this sounds naive. Public job postings get hundreds or thousands of applications, most of which are terrible and need to be filtered out. Expecting an immediate response on one is not reasonable. If your friend is such an industry insider, it's surprising she didn't have a network that could short circuit this process for her. In general, my experience that if you are cold-applying for a jo…

Expecting a response to your job application in less than a month sounds naive?

Expecting any response to dropping your resume into a online form sounds naive IMO. Does anyone actually get jobs this way?

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

#269

Post by anon7725 »

runako wrote: post #220
wintogreen74 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time? I was hired by my current employer in less than 2 weeks from initial conversation and it was a bit of a smell that they weren't more thorough. Now I'm a hiring manager and am a little concerned with what I feel are "loose" practices that let too many marginal candidates through because otherwise "it's too hard to source talent". For me…

Consider the number of hours you actually spend interacting with a candidate during the interview process. If it's 40(!), bring them in for a full week and decide at the end of Friday. If it's closer to 10, bring them in Monday morning and decide by close of business Tuesday. All the delays are materially the fault of glitches in the hiring organization.

This is a good process to ensure you don’t hire anyone who is currently employed. I would not sign up for this even if I was between jobs unless I was desperate. I don’t mind coding challenges, etc, but the first few weeks at any job is mostly scut work getting things set up, meeting people, etc.

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

#270

Post by anon7725 »

xpe wrote: post #263
swiftcoder wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even FAANGs can pull this off. Amazon was routinely hiring folks in single-day loop with offer letter the following morning, back when I joined.

Likely you had a very particular set of (in-demand) skills. Right? What year was this?

Not the person you responded to, but same story for me in 2007. Loop and verbal offer the same day. I was/am not a big get, just a regular engineer.
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