Hacker News Reader

It's probably not a single position. They're probably just after developers generally and can fit them in at any experience level.

Suppose I only have one level of employee and they’re all in CO.

To keep the math and my HR processes simple, I pay them all $100K/yr and grant them all initially $200K in shares plus $100K/yr in refresher shares, vesting over 4 years. Someone who just joined will make $150K in the next 12 months. Someone who joined 2 years ago will make $200K in the next 12 months if our stock is UNCH since they joined. If it doubled since then, they’ll make close to $300K in the next 12 months.

Bam, my range is $150K-$300K/yr and I have the fairest, most equitable pay structure I could imagine. Layer on top of that complexities of people actually having different levels of productivity, different amounts of unvested stock appreciation, and you can have even wider spreads. Add to that having had to “buy out” someone’s unvested shares or bonus at another company to get them to switch to yours and the spread gets wider.

I thought the Colorado law was about base pay?

Personally I don't care about stocks on a job posting. I consider stocks to be worth 0 when considering offers unless it's a public company with all the information available for me to evaluate the company.

This is because statistically the startup will fail. And there's no way to make a fact based evaluation if it will fail or not until after you are working for them. If you are one of the initial hires it's basically blindly gambling on the founders. The exception being if the founders have previously founded successful startups, in which case you are betting on their experience.

> I thought the Colorado law was about base pay?

That’s not the way I read it:

Employers must include the following compensation and benefits information in each posting:

(A) the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) that the employer is offering for the position;

(B) a general description of any bonuses, commissions, or other forms of compensation that are being offered for the job; and

(C) a general description of all employment benefits the employer is offering for the position, including health care benefits, retirement benefits, any benefits permitting paid days off (including sick leave, parental leave, and paid time off or vacation benefits), and any other benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes, but not benefits in the form of minor perks.

RSUs are benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes.

B and C say "general description", while A says "rate" or "compensation"; has the exact meaning of those been figured out yet, w.r.t. what goes in the number and what goes in the text?

Further, why is pay tied to location anyway? Just because I chose to live in a cheaper region doesn't mean I can't produce the same value to the organization as someone in, say, SF. Are we to believe that employers are paying more in HCOL areas out of the goodness of their hearts?

The company is paying you the market rate, i.e as little as they can get away with, not how much value you create. Your location is one of the variables in calculating your market rate. Who knows , with remote work this may disappear, but I doubt it's what workers in the USA would want. I live in the UK, salaries in the USA are way higher. Then look at India.

My feeling is when people say location shouldn't matter then mean as long as the location is in their country.

By all means, if my employer can find someone in another country that they think can do as well as I do for less money, they ought to hire them. It would be foolish and (frankly) shitty to feel otherwise, especially for folks like me that are in the US purely by luck of birth.

If they're from a real poor country, maybe this practice will help their economy (not that that's a reason to do it necessarily).

> The company is paying you the market rate, i.e as little as they can get away with, not how much value you create

"As little as they can get away with, not how much value you create" sounds like a recipe for exploitation and dissatisfied employees. Which I suppose is exactly what we have.

It would also seem to create a strange incentive for people to move to places where the cost of living is higher.

People have been moving to the Bay Area chasing higher tech job pay since at least the late 90s. This doesn’t seem like anything new; companies have to pay you enough that you take a deal that’s better for you. You have to take low enough that the company still thinks it turns a profit by employing you.

With remote work becoming more common, I'd expect to see companies that embrace it refuse to hire remote-only workers who live in HCoL areas, or at least cap the number they're willing to hire.

That's assuming that companies will pay more for workers in HCoL areas. I don't see why that will be the case for remote work unless the company specifically wants to have workers in those HCoL areas.

If you are in say NYC and a company is trying to hire specifically in NYC you can expect to be paid enough to live in NYC. It doesn't matter that the company could get the work done for 1/4 the cost if they were OK with the work being done in Smallville, Kansas. You aren't competing with the Smallville programmer. Your only competition also demands NYC level pay.

When the company doesn't care where the work is done other than broad limits like "should be in the US" then you are competing with the Smallville programmer for the job. And with some dude in Hooterville. And in Lake Wobegon. And in Mayberry. You are in a market with a lot of people who will accept less than NYC salary.

Actually this isn't all that different than how companies handle pay within metropolitan areas now. For example a company in downtown Los Angeles isn't going to have a different pay scale for their employees that live in Compton and the ones that live in Malibu.

Cost of living is only a small part of the pay differential. Strong candidates with large scale prod experience are concentrated in markets where these skills are most valued and attainable. You can fill headcount for less by hiring out of smaller markets, but not if you want the same candidates big tech is competing for.

If everyone goes remote-first someday, market rates everywhere will equalize, but this hasn’t happened yet.

Then why are London FAANG salaries so much lower then US ones?

I’m under the impression that London’s tech market isn’t particularly hot apart from finance.

> I’m under the impression that London’s tech market isn’t particularly hot apart from finance.

This is because FAANG refuse to benchmark against finance, because it would cost them too much money. Like they wanted me to move from Dublin to London when I was at one, but the salaries were identical, but the living costs definitely were not (salaries were the same, but a FAANG salary in Dub puts you much closer to the top of the local income distribution than one does in London).

> Why would you have such a wide pay range of $150k-300k for a single position?

Because we’re hiring good candidates at various experience ranges.

If someone shows up with the most impressive resume and portfolio I’ve ever seen, I don’t want to lose them simply because our job description doesn’t have a salary high enough to convince them to join.

Likewise, if a college grad shows up with a potentially impressive but short resume then we might want to take a chance on them, but not if we’re forced to pay them senior engineer money because that’s what we put in the ad. If I have to pay senior engineer money, I’m going to wait until a senior engineer applies.

I'm struggling to see how you could write a job ad that both a college grad and a 15+ years' experienced lead would both apply to. It would have to be ludicrously vague.

I won't even know what I'm actually applying for until the "five minutes at the end" sometimes. The whole process is broken.

Were you kidnapped or otherwise taken to an interview against your will?

Otherwise, if you allow that situation to happen, well, you allowed it to happen.

At least in SV, many of the larger companies, startups and more established firms, interview candidates for multi-team group and then match candidates more specifically based on interview performance. Part of that process is leveling because many startups throw out senior titles like candy.

Last time I interviewed at Square, for example, after passing the interview for a particular group I met with several engineering managers within the group to understand my fit within their teams. That matching was a result of what teams the group thought I might be a good fit for based on the interview.

Nobody knows what anybody is worth, come on.

You know a high performer from a low one. Anything in between is anybody's guess.

Salaries are reflections of the negotiation market, which reflects merit, but only barely.

They're all like this. I know what the company does because I do my research, and I know what tooling they're using because that's 90% of the job description. I have no idea what problems the team currently faces.

Not OP, but we do the same thing.

We basically keep job listings limited to "we're writing cloud software using Angular, Spring, and relational data". We're a large company, so other teams do it differently, but my team tries hard to not put ceilings or floors on experience or skills. We've hired everything from summer intern to Principal (Staff) Engineer using the same job req. We also don't limit the listings to a specific functional area - we might hire Ops, Front or Back End, Full Stack, Test, Autimation, etc, using the same req. We also actively look for skills we don't currently "need", on the hope they will widen the practical experience of the team.

Honestly, truly, does all that extra detail around experience, "job duties", micromanaged required skills, etc, actually add any value to the listing? Does "Agile experience preferred" even mean anything?

You do have to put a salary in the offer letter, so at some point you decide what their level is based on their qualifications and pick a corresponding salary. If you really want to funnel all your candidates through one job description, write a list of levels and salary ranges in the description.

If you pick the salary without leveling first, then it's not based on their qualifications, and that's the type of discrimination these laws are trying to counteract.

>Honestly, truly, does all that extra detail around experience, "job duties", micromanaged required skills, etc, actually add any value to the listing? Does "Agile experience preferred" even mean anything?

Nope, but the "x years of experience" does. IME teams that have the wrong balance of experience tend to go way off course. I worked on a team with a lot of juniors that put out a similar advert (HR snafu) and we were flooded with even more. It was a struggle to mentor those we had let alone do actual work.

I probably would apply to such jobs if I were really desperate but if salary is left out I assume it's a lowball negotiating ploy and ignore them. I believe absolutely that in spite of all protests to the contrary that it absolutely is in all cases. No shame in that either. You might score somebody senior for cheap.

There are plenty of roles these days that are up-front about what they are, though.

Do you believe everyone deserves to be compensated equally? What about their experience? Is someone can do 2x the work or positive impact on my business, I'll happily pay them more than someone less capabile.