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Comment by arpinum | Hacker News Reader

When hiring I don't have a narrow range in mind, it can be 50% or more. I look at the individual and make a judgment call on their impact to the business. For software we don't have a widget factory where employees are easily substitutable.

I've tried the opposite, paid everyone the same. But there were clear differences in ability and more importantly outside options. It became a problem when it came to retention and the business didn't have the ability to overpay everyone to keep the top performers.

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You're describing levels. If your range is so wide the top of the range is double the bottom of the range, you're hiring at multiple levels, and you should just say that. You should also have more detailed descriptions that help you and candidates differentiate what those levels are.

More broadly than that -- it's not that you need to pay everyone the same, it's that you need clear structure around how your pay works.

An example that became a problem with one previous employer was that they kept saying "performance" was their only determining factor for pay, after it had come out that exactly one person on our team had been offered bonuses as a performance incentive.

It's not actually performance-based if you have different and better reward structures, or if you can't/won't explain why gaps exist.

It's mainly specialties, not just levels. Are you a graphic designer that can also build your designs for the web? Were you previously consulting for our largest customer? Do you speak Welsh for our important client in Pembroke? Did you previously work in tech stack X and want to get back to it, and could lead our effort into that market? I'll pay more for these even if they come in at the same grade. Pay is very subjective, it is a prediction about the value an employee can or does bring balanced against their next best option.

Many of those things you can still just say, in a job description, as details that make you stand out. Many of those specific details do have tangible value (though I'd still say if you include words like "lead" you're describing levels), and you're not necessarily just describing vibes, but what you also aren't describing is a reason why you wouldn't have some idea of what you would pay someone in normal circumstances.

Say that no one you interview has those particulars, and you hire someone who's just -- by your regular, baseline standards -- qualified for the job. Do you have a cutoff for what you would pay those people? Then you should probably post that, and then just act like companies that comply with this stuff already and include some kind of disclaimer, that extraordinary candidates may still fall somewhere outside that range.

Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?

> Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?

You want to set laws that hurt 99% of employees for a theoretical benefit to a 1% case for the employer?

what's the point of a pay grade if the pay is wildly different in the same grade?

it's just multiple grades at that point masquerading behind a broken HR system

"level" can be an internal designation to communicate to others about the problems you can take on. Says nothing about pay. Many ways for a company to operate.

People seem very attached - emotionally, almost morally - to a model of hiring that looks like this:

* The company decides to open a specific position, which it will fill no matter what.

* The position will pay the same amount no matter who fills it.

* There exists a binary condition called "qualified" which people metaphysically are or aren't.

* The job must not go to an unqualified person, but could go to any qualified applicant.

* Society may instruct you to use certain non-merit-based criteria to prefer some qualified applicants over others, but hiring managers and teams must not use their own subjective feelings or relationships to do so.

I can understand how a civil service or other massive bureaucracy full of principal-agent problems arrives at these rules, but they are obviously not the only valid way to assemble a high-performing team or the best one in all circumstances.

Then you should have more defined roles, even if organisationally they're the same, i.e. there's very clear expectations of differences in salaries (and business impact) between junior, mid and senior developers.

This is about job ads, not their internal designation. I don't put out 8 different job ads when 2 are sufficient.

Posting a job ad isn't the onerous part of the process though to be fair.

It does make me wonder what would happen if you put out 100 different job adverts split apart by £1,000 increments. I'm sorry you aren't suitable for the 100k job you applied for but would you consider our 97k role instead?

It makes sense for multiple job ads if there are completely different roles applied by completely different people. But, for the sake of hiring, it doesn't make sense to invent new titles just to justify differently negotiated salaries. For example, I was once hired as a "Senior Software Developer" who essentially got paid twice what the least senior Senior got; they were to some extent mislabelled: They were senior in another capacity than software, and had transitioned inside the company but kept their titel because people are vain. Our responsibilities were vastly different: He was a frontend tokenmaxxer, and I migrated strategic customers to on-prem Kubernetes by negotiating contracts, bootstrapping clusters, and adapting applications to run without autoscaling. They could have given either of us a different title, but for the sake of the value we added, the salary made sense.

A title like "Senior Software Developer" can range from 5 years of general-purpose web development experience to 20 years of highly specialized experience. Those "Principal" and "Staff" titles don't necessarily make sense outside of larger corporations.

Most recently I've seen salary ranges up to 30% of the upper bound. Completely reasonable.

The point is you should be putting out different job postings when you are looking for different personas.

I'm not answering a pitch that says "$100K-$350K salary, final decision based on vibes" but I will if it says "$250K-$270K salary, needs 10 years of experience leading X kinds of projects and proficiency in Y, Z".

This is an ideal state, for sure, but it's also where corporate bureaucracy gets in the way. It's FAR easier to have a catch-all, pretty generic posting for a category of role than to get approval for discrete postings for each conceivable instantiation of that role category within a hiring org. This is also why many [tech] companies will include leveling information in the posting in addition to a salary range, so candidates will know that they could be considered whether they slot in as, for example, an IC4 or IC5.

Maybe you should, one for each expected level, with a description of the expected qualifications of each and how much you’ll pay for those qualifications? Sort of an “if X, then Y, but if also Z, then W” thing? Like a company should?

So then put up multiple job listings with different salaries. State what the skill expectations and senority requirements for each are.

That's impractical most of the time. It's much more efficient to handle leveling during the interview process, and to coach the technical recruiter to use screening questions that give a decent indication of where a viable candidate might slot.

It's also easiest for candidates. If you are faced with 2 job postings about the same org at a company you may not have any experience with, how will you decide whether to apply for the lower or higher level role? It's not always clear.

How does the seniority requirements work? I've seen 1 year junior better than 8 years senior; 5 year senior with no difference to a typical 2 years junior and everything in between.

> When hiring I don't have a narrow range in mind, it can be 50% or more.

As an occasional hiring manager, having this sort of flexibility sounds really nice!

Unfortunately I have to define my requirements and justify a fairly narrow range when I want to add to my team, so it's not something I get to enjoy. There have definitely been candidates who stand out from the crowd and have higher expectations, that I have not been able to offer to.

i make a similar judgement call when i look at hiring manager and the workplace

This sounds like you don't know what the fuck your hiring for.

If you want juniors to fill out your team, why are you getting a bunch of seniors?

No, it sounds like there are clear differences in abilities.

If you think every junior/senior/staff has the same ability, you're delusional. Two people can broadly fall into the same bucket but be very different in terms of output.

Yes there are clear differences in skills. So if I'm hiring to fill a certain need, why would I consider someone who isn't skilled in that area?

I often look at a CV and notice specific skills that can benefit the business even if they aren't part of a normal job description. Imagine a software developer who used to be a graphic designer. I can save handoff time and have this person take on additional tasks, but it won't be in the job ad because the hit rate is too low. I can afford to pay that person more than others with comparable programming skills.

Or, I find value in areas that get overlooked in the market. Career transition people for example might not have many other options and I can take a gamble on how fast they ramp up.

100% wrong.

If I'm building a team, I don't need everyone at the exact same level. I want a mix. I want some juniors, some seniors and a tech lead. The job description is the same, I'm not writing 3 or 4.

Job descriptions for junior positions and tech leads are not the same.

Agreed, maybe a bad example.

But a team of SWEs at different experience levels for the same role won't be different job descriptions.

I'm in this situation right now, I have a minimum requirement, it could be MET with someone with 1-2 years of experience or 20 years.

But that is the MINIMUM, if I find someone that meets that minimum but I get a lot more, I will pay more. But I'm still not making multiple job descriptions with different ranges.

> But a team of SWEs at different experience levels for the same role won't be different job descriptions.

Why would you put people with different experience levels in the same role? You'll have three classes of people, only one of them "happy", for the others it'll be too much or too little. You cannot put a junior in the same position as a person who wants to be tech lead?

I think maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because having one job description for those three roles don't make much sense as I understand it currently.

I'm probably not explaining myself well, but besides from FAANGs that use levels, this is how every company i've worked at does thing.

We need a team of X people, we have minimum requirements. We are open to anyone as long as they are close to the requirements (100% match is never possible).

We evaluate the comp based on interview feedback... then as the team gets filled what we look for starts to narrow to "fill out the bench" so to speak.

But we won't ever go back and update the description or pay-band, no need.

You could just put multiple ranges and add additional details for what seniors/leads look like. You would have minimums for what those things are too, and those qualities would actually overlap a lot with a previous level's nice-to-have items.

There's valid conversation around the nuances of "what if this need isn't specific to a level?" but those don't excuse keeping people in the dark about what the job offers or requires.

Operational flexibility is a thing. A small company could be looking for competent and motivated people in general and adapt their internal processes to match the hire's experience level.

Couldn't you have a single job advert with a wide range and in the description say that you're looking for juniors, mid, and seniors and that you'll tell people early on where you think they'd slot in?

I can take multiple types of people, I'm casting a wide net to find value.

then you should expect to waste a bunch of time. yours and others'.

No, work with a recruiter who understands your business and is similarly aligned to spotting value at a good price. By the time I have an initial phone screen with a candidate I know their CV and their salary expectation and I have agreed to be in range of their expectations. Direct inbounds go through a 10-minute screen with a recruiter to collect additional details.

"Wanted: employees."

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