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Comment by roryirvine | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.

From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.

Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.

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> My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?"

The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.

So now in my initial intro call with any recruiter I just tell them my minimum, fully knowing that becomes the maximum offer. If they're ok with that we can keep talking, if not, that's cool, we both avoided wasting time.

That's why it's important to ask the recruiter, rather than wait to be asked.

That way you can respond to their range with something along the lines of "that sounds roughly what I was expecting", "okay, I'd probably be looking for the top end of that", "that's perhaps a little lower than I was expecting - is there enough room for flexibility for us to be able to continue talking?" or whatever. It's too early in the conversation to be doing a full salary negotiation, you're just making sure the role's at the right level.

There's a big problem with employers writing a senior-sounding job ad for a junior role - the salary range is a much more accurate indicator than a job description.

> The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.

Disagree, I've had "my range is X-Y", and the recruiter told me "for this role the range starts at Y+20%, are you ok with that".

It depends on the recruiter and how they work - someone asking for $X-Y when the role is $1.2Y could indicate that there's a role mismatch or a duty mismatch.

“Oh no I'd like to earn less money, sorry bye”

Heck, my experience lately has been that recruiters (or independent headhunters) are completely up front with the salary range explicitly because they don't want to waste anyone's time... and because there -- in tech especially -- can be enormous ranges of compensation for similar responsibilities.

That matches my experience - and I'd treat a failure to give a straightforward answer as a strongly negative signal, and would immediately concentrate my efforts on other opportunities.

I suspect we're pretty lucky in tech, though. Anecdotally, I've heard that in fields such as sales and marketing it's much more the norm to treat potential new hires in a much more adversarial manner.

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