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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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