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Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#11

Post by some_random »

wyager wrote: post #6
NonEUCitizen wrote: post #2

Has to be a tight range. Some recruiters try to give a non-sensical, meaningless range where the upper bound is close to 3x the lower bound.

How is that nonsensical? Lots of times, the same nominal job might involve vastly varying amounts of responsibility or productivity. I've seen positions where 3X dynamic range would be unreasonably small, e.g. at companies which don't bucket engineering roles into arbitrary seniority brackets.

Surely they would know what level of responsibility they expect if they're posting a job ad?

Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#12

Post by nolemurs »

I get so many contacts from recruiters that I'm never going to follow up on almost any of them.

Is salary information absolutely essential? No. But if I'm not pretty confident talking to you is a good use of time, you'll never hear from me, and not providing salary information is a great way to keep me uncertain.

I can think of two exceptions. For my first job I didn't really care about salary - my main goal was to get good experience and get into the field. Also, there weren't a ton of recruiters constantly spamming me. Alternatively, if you're a large well known company and I'm interested, then I'll just google to figure out what sort of salary to expect. In that case you don't have to explicitly tell me.

In all other cases, if you leave out the salary, I'll probably ignore your job.

Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#13

Post by bigbillheck »

arkitaip wrote: post #3

A reasonable range would absolutely be great but I understand why disclosing any salary information would be challenging for the company as it changes how compensation negotiation is done but will also affect the overall culture. Ultimately, you need to continue your first principles thinking and put this hypothesis to the test.

I used to work for the federal government, everybody knew more or less where everybody else was on the GS scale. Worked great.

Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#14

Post by ciupicri »

FWIW in case you didn't know:

> Pay Transparency: [European] Commission proposes measures to ensure equal pay for equal work [...]

> Pay transparency for job-seekers – Employers will have to provide information about the initial pay level or its range in the job vacancy notice or before the job interview. Employers will not be allowed to ask prospective workers about their pay history.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30429182

Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#15

Post by MereInterest »

wyager wrote: post #6
NonEUCitizen wrote: post #2

Has to be a tight range. Some recruiters try to give a non-sensical, meaningless range where the upper bound is close to 3x the lower bound.

How is that nonsensical? Lots of times, the same nominal job might involve vastly varying amounts of responsibility or productivity. I've seen positions where 3X dynamic range would be unreasonably small, e.g. at companies which don't bucket engineering roles into arbitrary seniority brackets.

That just means that the nominal job title is insufficient for making a job posting. There's no reason to think that the job title, which is dictated by the internal organization and hierarchy, would be at all correlated with the salary, which is dictated by the expertise and the demand for that expertise.

Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#16

Post by MereInterest »

arkitaip wrote: post #3

A reasonable range would absolutely be great but I understand why disclosing any salary information would be challenging for the company as it changes how compensation negotiation is done but will also affect the overall culture. Ultimately, you need to continue your first principles thinking and put this hypothesis to the test.

If I can understand how and why they would be hesitant to disclose salary information, but that doesn't mean that they should be given a free pass for it. Yes, this would change compensation negotiation, in the same way that cutting the deck changes a game of poker. It makes it harder for the deck to be stacked against you.

Hiding salary information makes it harder to negotiate and harder to see when you're being treated unfairly.

Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#19

Post by TechBro8615 »

It depends on the company size. If it’s a large company, I expect rigid and well-defined salary bands, so it would be nice if they’re published. For a smaller company, I don’t expect salary bands, and I treat the relationship more like a contractual one.

Any contract price is negotiable by definition (“meeting of minds”), and whether or not the job description provides an initial anchor price does not change that. So if it’s negotiable either way, then IMO it actually seems unfair for the company to name the salary because it means they’re providing the initial anchor.

It also depends on me. If I’m the head of a machine learning lab at Stanford, the salary is negotiable at the big company too.

So all in all, I’d say I expect companies to publish a range of salary, or at least include some indication they’re serious. If I see them in TechCrunch I know they have enough to pay me, and if I’m worried about their runway then maybe I should work at a big company with rigid salary bands.

Re: Poll: Do you expect/want to see salary information in a job ad?

#20

Post by wyager »

some_random wrote: post #11
wyager wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that nonsensical? Lots of times, the same nominal job might involve vastly varying amounts of responsibility or productivity. I've seen positions where 3X dynamic range would be unreasonably small, e.g. at companies which don't bucket engineering roles into arbitrary seniority brackets.

Surely they would know what level of responsibility they expect if they're posting a job ad?

A single job might cover vastly different responsibility depending on skill or experience. It's unreasonable to expect every job to fall into a nice narrow description. For most of my career I've been something like "software engineer", as have people with much more or less experience than me.
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