Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

In an early stage startup, there are relatively few "defined" positions.

Wanted: Smart people who will figure out what to do. Pay commensurate with added value.

> Pay commensurate with added value.

In a statement like that they have an idea of what is valuable and what they would be willing to pay for it. Seems like a perfect opportunity to give a salary range.

Why would smart people want to apply to a job with ambiguous compensation ranges? In what ways are being ambiguous better than being direct in a job listing?

I'm going to remind everyone of this important idiom: As a business owner, nobody is as invested in your company as you. Even if your employees have a lot of passion for your business, even if they have a little "what-if" equity, they're never, ever going to have the same level of dedication to your role as you, the founder/owner/creator of that business.

All of this is also to say: it is not a buyers market for skilled tech labor right now. If you're an early-stage, my advice is to start competing with the open market.

> Why would smart people want to apply to a job with ambiguous compensation ranges?

People are motivated by many things, not just money. I took a major paycut to do something I believe strongly in. We're not a for-profit startup trying to make our founders rich. We're a non-profit trying to help people. To some people the feel-goods of that is worth a smaller paycheck.

> In what ways are being ambiguous better than being direct in a job listing?

Well, if the salary range is very broad then at best it's no helpful, at worst it's misleading. If we found a truly incredible person, we could potentially try to raise funding to meet a higher salary, particularly if hiring this person meant we didn't have to hire another person. In addition, if it's going to be really useful it takes precious time/effort away from engineering work (building the product and putting out fires) to try and create a matrix of salary ranges depending on all the factors. Some of the factors we probably don't even know yet.

It’s great that you found a non-profit, and that its mission motivates you.

I realize that different motivators exist for different people, but I still don’t understand how not knowing the pay range upfront benefits anyone but the employer.

The Chan Zuckerberg foundation is a non-profit. The NFL is a non-profit. Non-profits aren’t excluded from labor market conditions. Non-profits aren’t even obligated to be all that charitable in most cases.

My employer could give me a massage every day but I’d still want to know the pay range.

As a candidate, I don’t mind opaqueness with regards to salary. My time outside of work is pretty much worthless. I don’t mind talking to someone for an hour or however long if it’s a job I might like doing. If the price is right, great, if not, well whatever. The benefit to me is that if they get invested in hiring me, I can push them on salary if I choose to do that.

So you don’t want that, assume you are smart, and that all smart people are like you?

How pleasant your life must be.

I never said any of those things, and I wasn’t trying to be inflammatory.

My questions are serious. In what situation is a stated pay range a detriment to the job posting? It’s my belief that just about every company who is competitive with compensation benefit from stating it up front, while all the companies that are sub-standard benefit from hiding compensation.

In other words, anyone unwilling to state their salary range is afraid or aware that they don’t pay competitively.

Ambiguous compensation allows more room for negotiation - that's why.

One job I had had no defined plan for compensation so I asked for a number and they gave it because they had no idea anyway. I also pushed other benefits and got those because

I went from a job that paid ~$80K in 1995 to this new job at ~$120K thanks to the ambiguity. This was Hewlett-Packard as a lateral transfer from a defined job role to a brand new job role that didn't even have a "pay curve" at HR.

As it turns out I'm pretty good at reading situations and thinking outside of the box so it was "easy". Not everyone has that skill so they want things "safe" and "defined". That's not me and never will be.

But you didn’t know their budget. What if $150k was reasonable for their budget? You don’t really know. For all you know $120k was low for them.

Maybe it was high for you, and that’s fine. But “negotiation” is a facade for the vast majority of jobs. Companies know exactly how much money each role in the field commands. They pay research firms and do their own google searches to gauge local salary expectations.

They’ll also happily take advantage of candidates who accidentally give them a low ball salary expectation out of pure naivety or inexperience. That’s why ever recruiter under the sun asks for your desired salary first.

I’d argue that negotiation has nothing do to with whether the pay range was stated. Either the company has the money or they don’t. Might as well just say it up front.

You may not have specific positions in mind, but if you don't have a rough idea "here are the kinds of things my startup will need to do in the near-to-medium term" and "this is roughly the amount I can afford to spend annually on positions I haven't yet hired for, in aggregate", then that doesn't sound like a company that's got a good future to me.

Early stage startups are a very small slice of all employers (and the returns flow predominately to founders and VCs), probably best not to optimize labor law for their specific needs. And real talk, the pay is very unlikely to be commensurate with added value [1] [2].

EDIT: @stickfigure: I don't disagree. My comments are for the benefit of employees, not early startup owners/founders/investors. Sell the dream, I'm pointing out reality.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25488751 (cherry picked subthread, but the whole thread is very helpful on this topic)

[2] https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ | https://danluu.com/startup-options/

Early stage startups are prevalent on HN, which is the subject at hand.

Also, half of Americans work for small businesses. It is probably best not to optimize labor law for megacorps either.

We're a non-profit. Any "VCs" are donating with no expectation of return, and the founders are the ones that bound their hands with the non-profit status in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com