Hacker News Reader

Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

The big ranges is a logical consequence of such stupid rules. People are not commodities, and only in the most trivial of work can you a priori know what an individual brings to it. It's typical government thinking that makes no sense in the real world. So employers are stuck publishing an absurdly wide band that reflects the difference in what different people might bring to the position.

This is effectively populism, a simple and wrong solution to a much more complex problem.

View on HN

In the vast majority of cases, you’re not going to know what an individual brings to the job for 6 months to a year at the minimum. The majority of the pay difference between 2 people with the same job title (assuming standard bigco leveling) comes down to negotiating ability.

Published pay ranges aren’t going to solve anything, but they do reduce the information asymmetry a little bit. They give you and idea of what is possible for they title in that company at that location. Companies have an incentive to post a relatively accurate range, and in most of the jobs I’ve applied for it was.

> The majority of the pay difference between 2 people with the same job title (assuming standard bigco leveling) comes down to negotiating ability.

No, it comes down to about 1/3 negotiating ability and about 2/3 prior experience, impressions you give at the interview, and leverage (e.g. other offers real or perceived). The first one you can get from the resume and the other two happen over the course of the interview(s).

If your resume shows you as a perfect fit for a position with a ton of relevant hyper-specific experience, you will naturally get an offer higher in the pay band than someone with half the amount of pseudo-relevant experience. Pay bands even $40-50k will help because most people actually do have a decent idea how qualified they are for a given job. I've applied for things where I'd be happy getting an offer toward the bottom of the pay band due to no relevant experience, and applied for things where I knew I should be at the very top.

When I say negotiating ability I also mean to include multiple offers. Which in my experience is the single biggest factor in determining pay for most software engineers.

I agree more specialized and very senior rolls are different, but most people are going into much more generic roles. Even then bad negotiating skills can swamp out everything you else if you throw out a low number to someone willing to take advantage of it.

All said we agree that realistic pay bands will help here.

I have yet to see a position where the company has no idea about the budget allocated for it.

It's not uncommon to have budget be expressed in headcount rather than dollars, though. So you can hire one "senior software engineer" and your HR department has a model that tells them at what percentile of "senior software engineer" pay any given amount is - then you need to go into an exception process if you (as hiring manager) want to pay over 90th or 100th percentile or whatever.

Says who?

Labor is absolutely a commodity, and companies price labor both for buying and selling based on skills and demand.

You may inhabit some obscure corner of the world where you’re some sort of free agent priced individually. But most likely, you’re working for a company in a title assigned by some HR person into a salary band. The salary band is chosen by the business unit based on their budget.

The wide bands are published to minimally comply with the law. In the long run, they advertise to applicants that the company will happily bone them given the choice.

Or they could just figure out how much the labor they are shopping for is worth to them and advertise for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com