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Comment by cpwright | Hacker News Reader

You should consider total compensation and salary vs. just a salary. If you're looking at finance, people will have requirements for both a base salary and the total compensation. Looking at them in isolation doesn't work. Same thing if a large portion of your offer from say Google is in RSUs, that's not cash; but is essential for evaluating the economics of the offer.

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You have a valid concern. We are starting with salary to simplify things because cash is what matters the most.

In my opinion, you should add total compensation right from the beginning. This is because (1) You would be capturing data from many people (hopefully) and it would be difficult to fix later, (2) The site will be less useful without for many people including me, and (3) Some people will invariably confuse and put total compensation anyways which will introduce unnecessary variability in your data.

On the other hand, adding total compensation from the beginning cannot be too complex.

Depends what goes into "total compensation".

Things like startup options are basically monopoly money. If the salary is $30,000 but they offer two ten-thousandths of a company which is currently worth nothing, but they plan for it to be worth five billion dollars in five years, is that a $230,000 salary?

Recruiters will post bullshit if there's no downside; to avoid this you need concrete measures that can't be manipulated and can be audited.

Total compensation need not be included as a single number, it may/should be separated into actual factual numbers like base salary, fair market value of stock options / RSUs at the time of grant, cash bonus, etc. probably with a statement that the candidate is willing to trade one component for another to find a suitable mix.

Startups and big companies follow different norms, I am unsure if the latter should be ignored.

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