My eyes, however, were set on a specific small company because I liked their product. The process was long and involved multiple meetings, a take-home problem, and stretched over 2 or so months. I was upfront about what my salary expectations were (wasn't looking for a raise, just a lateral move). They said we discuss salary when you meet the founders, i.e. the last step before getting hired, but they also didn't tell me that my range was way off.

Turns out I had played this 9 week game and turned down other offers just to be severely low-balled by them. Maybe they saw that I really wanted the position and thought they could get away with a low offer.

Obviously, I rejected their offer on the spot. I also promised myself to never, _ever_, be fooled like that again. We talk money before I invest any significant amount of time or I walk.

I recently found a new job, had a backup offer after a week, and the job I actually wanted 4 weeks later, after about 7 working days post contact.

After I signed, several of the firms I'd interviewed with got back to me with interest. This is weeks after initial contact, and weeks after the last interview, so if course I thought they weren't interested.

I'm happy with with long thread time, but not long wall time. I don't mind people bringing me into 6 or 7 hours of interviews over a day or two, what I mind is doing those calls over the course of several weeks. It really bothers me to do an interview every week with a firm for a month.

For people who go for firms that are known for long processes, how do you do this? Just hang in there with your old job? What if something better turns up faster?

When I left my last job, I quit without having anything lined up, and was fortunate enough to have a bit of buffer to take some time off to recuperate and search for new work. I got some promising interviews, but none were like my interviews with the company I work for now. I rejected a number of offers while still in the process with my current company (with the full understanding that there was no guarantee of anything waiting for me). My priority at the time was finding somewhere where I knew I would love to work, and not getting back to work as soon as I could. For me, it paid off to wait.

Our interview process is pretty involved, and not for nothing — we get a lot of applicants, screen heavily, and put in a lot of time and effort into each individual candidate at every stage. We don't have dedicated recruiters, and besides our ops team, we've got individual developers, designers, product managers, support folks, etc. involved in hiring for their respective domains. Our interviews are humane, first and foremost, and a good number of candidates I've gotten to speak to have described the process as refreshing (well, relative to the general hell that is interviewing). The general process is: written questionnaire, two interviews (one technical/skill-focused, one non-technical), and a chat with execs.

It's completely understandable if this process doesn't work for all candidates; we've made great progress tightening up the process, shortening it without compromising on quality, and have invested a lot of time in tooling to help us out to speed things up. But it also works exceptionally well for us and the folks we're lucky to work with (~0.1–1% hire rate depending on position) — since I started a few years ago, the company has more than doubled in size (from a small to a medium company), and in that time, we've had a total of 2 individuals decide it wasn't a good fit for them. The company culture is like nothing else, and it's an amazing place to work.

Based on applicants it's ok, went all seen how any job ad attracts piles and piles of spam applications.

* Initial candidate screening reduces the pool by 85–95% (leaving 5–15% of the initial pool) * Interview #1 reduces the pool further by 50–66% (leaving ~3–4% of the initial pool) * Interview #2 reduces the pool further by another 66–75% (leaving ~1–2% of the initial pool) * Final chat usually doesn't reduce the pool, but it's one last pass for additional signal * We choose a single candidate of whoever remains

For a position with 400 applicants, it could look like

* Initial screening leaves 40 candidates for interview #1 * Interview #1 leaves 15 candidates for interview #2 * Interview #2 leaves 4 candidates for final chat * We pick from those final 4

When the quality of a hire isn’t easy to determine, this enables nearly every company (especially those where people are collegial) to think their people are the best.

Interviewing can easily eat up 2-3 days of your life.

You only get 15-30 days of vacation per year.

Theoretically, you are working to have free time.

This is maybe 1/5th of your free time per year. You can't waste this on unknowns.

Give me the salary up front or p#$$ off.

This is why I'm glad to have "unlimited" PTO (subject to manager approval + must be requested at least the duration in advance, e.g. 2 weeks notice for 2 weeks off), along with a few annual company-wide breaks and an earned month-long break every 3 years.

- don't have to pay out employees who didn't take their vacation - nobody taking vacation to use expiring vacation days - employees take less vacation in general

That said, I need to take more PTO so I don't burn out...

Good to see someone do this. I do this.

I no longer submit applications to any job until I've spoken to someone who works there to ask hard questions of them before I interview. I also no longer consider any job that lacks clear articulation of the platonic ideal of a candidate.

Interesting and a bit creepy.

I think here in California for nerds who have been around for a while, companies have at least some concept of what competitive rates are, so I hadn't worried about posted salary ranges. If they waste your time leading up to a lowball offer, they at least have wasted their own time as well, so they have an incentive to not do that. That of course assumes you didn't do a take home assignment ;).

One of their investors came in to run the test, it was his thing, apparently. Weird industry full of weird and corrupt people.

Apparently Frank Gore had one of the all time lowest scores with a 6. He is a borderline Hall of Fame caliber running back.

How can those people claim to be interviewers?

They must be leaking so many great makers arbitrarily. I assume that this helps the kind of work they do in some mysterious way?

They said "Good, you passed the assignment, we'll call you when we have clients for your range". I kept my old job and I'm still waiting for a client from them.

As having a developer background that switched more towards management now, how do you expect companies to hire? From what I see take at home tasks are not ok, making everyone loose their minds, technical interviews are also not ok, then what? The attitude of developers now is: 30 minute interview in which the company needs to offer 100% salary increase compared to previous job, pay the developer a full day as he took 30 minutes for you and then just hire him based on his CV in which he lists all possible technologies in the world that he read about once in an article or wrote a to-do app 3 years ago.

> how do you expect companies to hire?

At least in my case, if I have 25+ years of employment history on my resume doing the same thing that I'm interviewing for (and this can be verified), the interview process should be a lot simpler.

That said, I am not all that averse to a respectful-of-my-time take home or having a discussion about a particular piece of code with a bit of prep, etc.

I've seen programmers far better than me get chewed up and spit out by the FAANG interview process because they hadn't prepped their leetcode skills enough. Anyway, I'm sure we could debate the interview process to death, but my original question stands: Can you just straight up say no to a coding interview at any FAANG or FAANG-like companies and actually get to an offer without having massive online reputation points?

I've had coding interviews at big companies but always on their premises, with the interviewer there talking to me while I code. So I'm ok with that. They've never asked me to do a take home. I did a few of those for smaller companies before realizing that it's better to refuse.

I want to know that the people I'll be working with are at least baseline competent in that regard.

There are incompetent charlatans that you’re competing against and if you’re not willing to engage to demonstrate that you’re not, some will (not entirely unreasonably) assume that you might be one.

That's when I realized what should have been obvious: the less rigorous the interview, the less effective it is at keeping out unqualified folks.

The ads performed equally well in regard to total responses with the better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges.

And... before you say, perhaps your salary ranges were bad, they weren't. Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit. In my opinion, salary is a sign of respect from you employer.

If your primary reason for responding to an ad is based upon salary you are not going to be happy where you work. I promise. Of the top reasons people are happy at work, salary is way down on the list. [0] It is important, it makes it possible to pay bills, but it isn't what makes people happy.

Meaning, if you are looking for a place you will enjoy working, do not start with salary.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/12/15/the-top-...

You're conflating multiple things here. People aren't focusing on money because it's the most important part. They focus on money because it's one of the few things that's relatively easy to make tangible ahead of time. Similar goes for things like remote/hybrid, secondary benefits, etc.

Many elements on that list, while important, are incredibly difficult to equate in practice without speaking with employees or reading up on the company. Take the following:

>1 Appreciation for your work

How in the world are you going to evaluate this pre-interview or even post hiring process? Both parties are showing their best selves. It's incredibly abstract and difficult to measure.

>2 Good relationships with colleagues

Again, difficult to measure. Establishing good relationships takes time. Additionally, most places (at least here) have people who are decent to get along with, they aren't filled with horror individuals. At least, I'd hope hiring processes would at least filter the most obvious nutcases out after all those hours spent.

>3 Good work-life balance

Here's one you can measure much more easily. Few core hours and a "do whatever whenever" mentality outside of core hours attracts individuals. Still I don't see most companies post it. It goes far beyond hybrid and remote work, and even that is already hard to pull out of them. Then at the end of the interview, you get a "yeah we have a flexible schedule. Our hours are from 7 to 7." Great.. I guess.

Obviously, salary is not the only criteria for picking a new role, but by publishing it upfront, you quickly sort out the expectations (which leads to less churn at later stages) and also contribute to a more inclusive and fair job market.

Some other points that we got as feedback from the tech communities:

- publishing tech stacks & engineering methodologies is quite useful too

- it's nice if a company provides a contact person for questions BEFORE applying

- you should act swiftly and not let candidates wait for weeks for your decision

[1] https://swissdevjobs.ch/

https://devitjobs.uk/

https://devitjobs.us/

https://germantechjobs.de/

Not only are you supporting my argument, you're also showcasing how ridiculously inefficient the hiring process is from the candidate's side. Without it being obvious whether this is a net gain for the employer.

I don't think the GP was arguing with you; was the poster's first comment on this article.

I'm paid to work 40h/week.

Am I going to be expected to be working more than that? If so, I'll pass.

If there's occasional overtime, sure, fine. But do I get paid extra for it? Does it get banked into extra PTO?

And so on, stuff I ask prospective employers in the first conversation.

My contract specifically says I work 40h/week, have X days off/year (outside of statutory holidays) as PTO, etc.

This means that 5 days a week, I am at my keyboard, available on Slack, etc for 8 hours per day.

Hours are logged in a time tracking application (including time spent when there was nothing to do), and overages get added automatically to holiday time.

Maybe it's different elsewhere, but where all the tech companies are, it just doesn't work the way you're describing it. If you're being forced to punch a timecard and salaried, I would contact an attorney.

When I was salaried at a FAANG, they had us start clocking to pay OT when we exceeded 40h, which was most people much of the time. It was a way to keep the pay competitive. This was ten years ago, so no idea if that’s still a thing.

If you were putting less than 40 hours a week in your timesheet, you had to use some form of paid time off (holiday, vacation, sick) or simply not get paid.

I think things should be more based on goals than on time itself, honestly. What I mean is: if you work 40h but you do not deliver anything, how is that good compared to someone that in 32 delivers more? We have to put ourselves on the side of the employer also, even if some people hate them.

This is normal. This is OK.

Asking an employee make this a consideration when negotiating with an employer is a dereliction of duty on behalf of the hiring manager and difficult for the candidate to judge due to information asymmetry. If you're building a team, you should know what kind of talent fits on it and make an offer on those merits. That's what being a hiring manager entails.

What I mean, all in all, is: we all should care. That's why it is called an organization.

I agree with job about the job of a manager. I am just telling you that each one has her responsibility. All of us.

Even then, expectations of what a role does vary from one org to another. I don't think it's realistic to have someone outside of an organization say "I'm a senior/staff engineer" and for that person to have consistent expectations on what that statement means from for a potential employer from one interview to the next.

> I agree with job about the job of a manager. I am just telling you that each one has her responsibility. All of us.

No disagreement there. My intended point is what appropriate expectations are at various points of a potential employees tenure at an organization. A interviewee has no responsibilities: they have no employment contract and no expectations on them other than those a hiring team or manager brings into the room. The responsibilities come after the interviewee agrees to their job responsibilities and signs an employment contract.

It also depends on :

1. How creative/smart we are in achieving outcomes with less work.

2. Would my company provides a platform to accelerate this?

The status quo is, you're not getting that information upfront. It would very much be useful for you to know before sinking in several hours of effort and accumulate stress, only to figure out it doesn't at all match your preferences and the remainder of the package doesn't make up for it.

It is also one of the few things that companies can do which won't increase costs when practiced properly. That's the whole point of the root comment, and it falls flat given most job ads are secretive about almost everything.

It doesn't generally depend on how creative/smart we are, nor even our outcomes with less work. You working on a task that is easy for you doesn't mean that I should work more and you should work less. It really just means that we can expect different things from you than me, which is realistic so long as they aren't vastly different on the same task.

Work-life balance doesn't really depend on anything the company does other than having policies that allow for it and then actually following through.

I don't care how nice the a place it is to work, I'm not applying to the $70k place. If I can't quickly figure out where you fall on that spectrum, I'm not going to bother to contact you because job listings are not rare. If you somehow manage to present as exactly the perfect place to work, I might contact you—to ask what the salary range is, and if you won't say up-front, I'm out.

It takes exactly one time sitting through interviews, having everyone be super excited about hiring you, then naming a totally normal rate when they ask what salary you're looking for, and watching everyone's faces turn green, to never, ever waste time doing that again. I've had mine already.

I can't say I hate my job but I have zero interest in it. Where as I had lots of <$100k jobs I loved. My life was better. I only get one life. I'd prefer to live a happy life than a well paid life. Right now I get paid well but my life feels like it's just bleeding away as a drone.

The biggest reason I haven't pulled the trigger is there's no guarntee that taking the $70k will actually be fun this time. I have my criteria for taking the jump though and if they're met I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I think work is work, the more a workplaces tries to trick you into believing you're in a family or home environment they're not being clear on the work. Competency trumps all benefits.

Sure, if they could press a button and make more, they would, but in reality getting a higher salary requires to change jobs and they often have concerns about moving to a new place, doing something different, working with new people, wondering if they are going to like it or not, which ends up in them settling for a lower salary, especially if that salary covers everything they wanna do.

Often those thoughts are irrational, but thats how humans function.

Except now you have a 6 year gap on your resume to explain and probably a 6 year degradation of skills unless you're really disciplined.

False. I took five years to explore personal projects and then couldn’t get a callback to save my life. After landing a menial temp job, suddenly I got calls and interviews and landed a real job in no time. A huge gap can torpedo your efforts.

That kind of freedom is normally only reserved for the kids of the very wealthy, and it opens up all kinds of opportunities.

For the standard 4-year vesting schedule, and assuming a new $350k grant every year, this means actual earnings are:

   Year 1: $150k + $0        $150k
   Year 2: $150k + $87.5k    $237.5k
   Year 3: $150k + $87.5k*2  $325k
   Year 4: $150k + $87.5k*3  $412k

Only by year 5 you'll finally actually earn the $500k/year, and the vesting schedule has such an impact on the early earnings that even after a decade, your yearly average is still $400k.

Not to forget taxes. So the idea to "save for one year then take 6 years off" is kinda off the menu unless they've been at the company for a long, long time, or are willing to spend those 6 years living in Thailand.

But you're right, the 70k place might be just as much work, but they just don't make that much money, or any other series of situations.

500k requires you to live in San Francisco, commute to the office every day at strict hours and is at a soul crushing, bureaucratic big corp.

70k allows you to work from anywhere in the world, async an on your own schedule. Also, you get more vacation. 6k USD per month is a lot in many countries.

If you want to live now not later, I can see why you'd choose the 70k job.

i was stunned

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

It isn't just about the money, it's about the respect. Many, many people leave jobs because of the salary. Not just they need more money, but because they know they're worth more than that and can get it.

Those people are not going to bother looking at jobs that pay less than they're worth. They are absolutely going to look at the money first, and other benefits after. All those benefits matter, but money is the one that's forced their hand. And by extension, respect.

And, on a personal note, transparent wages are known to help break underpayment cycles where workers have been repeatedly underpaid and at each new opportunity their compensation is based on "Well what did you make in your previous job?" - a lack of pay transparency can end up giving people with social difficulties or who are of a visible minority much less take home. I want to work at a company where everyone is respected and valued because those companies are more successful in the long term. "Those who would give up company morale, to purchase a little temporary profit, deserve neither profits nor morale." - Benjamin Franklin (probably)

For example, I used to work in a SCIF for a government contractor in Northern Virginia, making 95k. No windows, no internet, no cell phone, no outside software without an approval process (had to manually burn linux packages to a CD, often multiple times a day because of dependencies).

Then I got a job at Amazon in their Austin location, essentially almost tripling my salary with the stock growth pre pandemic, with way better work environment, way easier work, but also with teammates with way less skill (after all, writing java web services isn't that hard)

So naturally, as my team and teams around us were hiring, to take advantage of the referral bonus, I contact all my old teammates, who would have easily aced the interview because they all had plenty of experience writing low level C code that was highly optimized, to suggest they apply.

Should be a no brainer, Austin had low cost of living back 5 years ago, no state income tax, your would be making way more, right?

Out of the 20 that I contacted, of them wanted to join. A lot of them were either single or with girlfriends, i.e without family, so relocation would not have been an issue. But they were perfectly content being way underpaid, living in a shitty area with high CoL. Still to this date don't know why. Seems like people value a certain things other than money.

Just because someone is single doesn't mean they don't have family and friends in the area. The further the move, the less contact they have with their existing social network. Not everyone is up for that, especially if you are moving a decent distance (like between states).

I feel some of it myself, so I can understand it, but it's crazy hard for so many people.

In a similar story, my father once told me, "People are always happy to pay you less than you are worth."

I don't really care about your promise because after many (too many?) years in business and seeing a lot of companies from the inside without any restrictions I can tell you that companies that paid at or above market rates generally had better work/life balance than the ones that did not and the people I spoke there definitely seemed substantially happier than in the places where they were paying below market rate.

In those places salary was usually just one indicator of many where incompetent management was showing through. Either you're a founder or you should make a very decent wage and anybody that tries to tell you that their crap salary is made up trough fringe benefits is taking advantage of you (or at least trying to do so). That you managed to trick some more qualified people into responding that otherwise would have rejected you out of hand is not a positive for them, it's a positive for you.

Employees can use a salary range to quickly weed out the employers to avoid from the ones to talk to and I would reverse your statement to 'If you are looking for a place that won't make you feel bad start with salary'.

Look, it doesn't make sense to respond to ads for positions where there's no reasonable way that I'd accept the job based on comp.

For the most part, I've been an entrepreneur / my own boss. But I remember 2 interview processes where money was talked about too late (one for a consulting job, and one for a full time position) and the offer was abusively low. I think there was the hope that I would try to justify the sunk cost of the interviewing process by taking the deal.

There's a lot of talk that not posting ranges can contribute to discriminatory practices. I think this could be true -- I think of wife's experience as she was entering the workforce. She was president of the mech-eng honor society, magna cum laude from a highly ranked university, with better work experience than most graduates. Multiple employers gave her absurdly lowball offers after she interviewed-- literally half of the average going rate for new grads-- perhaps mistaking her warmness for being willing to roll over and not negotiate. (She ultimately got a gig in the upper quartile).

P.S. Now I make about 3-6% of what I could make elsewhere-- I'm a middle school teacher. There was no need to surprise me with the number at the end to get me to take this offer. Salary isn't the end-all, be-all, but keeping it opaque concentrates too much power with the employer and that power is often used for dubious ends.

You're concealing relevant information in order to sucker in people who have no interest. It's the central mechanism behind "linkbait" headlines. It's just a dark pattern.

People who were not interested in a job with your salary range responded to ads that omitted the salary range. They heard you out because they had already committed their time to reach out to you. This basically shifts hiring costs onto the applicants in that they have to waste their time discussing a job they would never take because you held back the information they needed to know that it was a job they would never take.

Somehow, you've found a way to rationalize this as passion.

But he said he got better candidates with the ad that didn't post salary ranges. If I understand your analogy, that's like (counterintuitively) getting more responses for the expired milk.

The better question is were they able to hire any of those better candidates after they told them that the milk was expired?

One way you might see that effect is if both candidates who are good fits for the role and candidates who are bad fits for the role apply more often when a high salary is posted, but the number of bad fits increases faster than the number of good fits (e.g. because there is some subset of people who will send their application to every role that pays over a certain threshold whether or not they are qualified).

If it's sufficiently costly to distinguish qualified from unqualified candidates, the company might be better off not showing a salary range, even accounting for how it causes good people not to apply. That approach does feel like an inelegant hack to get around their inability to easily tell whether someone would actually perform well in the role though, so addressing that root cause would be better in that scenario if they could figure out how to do it.

When you put a range of $100-120k, the very high quality candidate who won't accept an offer less than $150k doesn't apply.

Or, put another way:

> It could simultaneously be true that including a good salary range increases the number of applicants who are good fits for the role, and also true that including a good salary range decreases the average quality of candidates.

Part of "good fit" could be "willingness to accept compensation in range". If the job range says $10/hr, the average quality of applicants will go down because the MIT Ph.D.'s won't apply-- but you weren't going to hire them at $10/hr anyways.

> Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit

Your example covers the case of "mid-range salary", overqualified applicant doesn't want the job, but wasn't going to get hired anyways because overqualified. Parent's example covers "very high salary", underqualified applicant wants the job just because the number is high. Given the "salary offerings are very aggressive", then why would we be talking about a "mid-range salary" case.

The ones that actually pay top of market rate I reach out to, not the other way around.

(Especially since it's only a problem if the higher pay motivates more bad applicants that are hard to distinguish from good applicants. If it encourages 100 people who have no relevant experience to apply, that brings the average down, but it doesn't increase the probability of making a bad hire.)

> The ads performed equally well in regard to total responses with the better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges

He did, and that raises a lot of questions:

Were the ads identical otherwise?

Were the salaries actually competitive or did he just think they were?

Did any of these better candidates actually accept an offer?

> It is important, it makes it possible to pay bills, but it isn't what makes people happy. Meaning, if you are looking for a place you will enjoy working, do not start with salary.

This feels strange to me… I have a minimum salary for which I wouldn’t consider working for a company even if they offered me flying rainbow unicorns. It’s not a gajillion $FAANG but there is a minimum.

If I can get that at the beginning of the process, this saves both myself and the company time and money.

Whatever that big number is.. double it is what I'm saying!

Anyway, do you apply this logic to your other vendors? Do you tell your accountant that you'll only pay them 70% of market because they should love what they do so much they shouldn't care what you pay them? They'd laugh you out of the room, and rightly so.

I enjoy my job and have turned down a few higher salary positions because the stress they would introduce into my life would result in an overall lower quality of living and the amount their offering isn't enough for me to burn myself out for a few years to coast for the rest of my life... but my SO is nearing retirement and is slowly working to scale back their working hours - the loss of their income will mean a return to the drawing board and more math to make sure we can continue live comfortably.

A good pun.

The money stops being enough after a surprisingly short time. It would be interesting to see how long people could stomach terrible work for great pay.

You have capped your own imagination. Whatever number you are considering, while you still think this is true, multiply it by 100.

> terrible work

I should clarify that I specifically mean unpleasant work. If it's literally killing me by say, inhalation of aerosolized pig brains or standing in cyanide or something, deal's off.

You wouldn't need to because if the pay is so great you can soon retire.

A company specifying an actual reason for rejecting a candidate? In writing??

(/j)

1. The correlation is weak

2. It drops really quickly after satisifying the minimum

3. it's very different for every individual

Good recruiters try to look for compatibility here very early in the process; unfortunately most recruiters are not good.

    "A 2014 SAP survey found that compensation is the #1 factor that matters most to employees"

    "Another survey by the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) conducted in 2013 also found that compensation and pay was the #1 factor contributing to job satisfaction"

The OP also doesn't say that their "primary reason for responding to an ad is based upon salary"; they may also be filtering aggressively based on the industry, tech stack, role, etc, and also filtering based on salary.

> And... before you say, perhaps your salary ranges were bad, they weren't. Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit. In my opinion, salary is a sign of respect from you employer.

What's your hypothesis for why they performed worse? If I saw a listing for a job I wanted, for which I was qualified and had a salary range within my target, you'd better believe I'd apply for it. The Occam's Razor explanation is that the listed ranges were below more experienced candidates' expectations for the position.

I could see other things swaying stronger candidates away from applying to the jobs with salary ranges; it can be difficult to tell the distribution of salaries within the range, so perhaps they didn't want to risk being offered at the lower end of the range.

This is bad analysis. Employees will already self-select based on pay.

I would bet you real money right now that if you polled employees as they left the company what their future salary is going to be, the majority will be making more.

1. They get to contribute more to the success of the company

2. What they built typically has real users

3. They are valued and get paid commensurately with the near infinite leverage they bring to the company.

4. They get to work with other like minded software engineers.

5. There is probably an established career path for them if they perform well.

Good engineers typically ALREADY work at a place they enjoy. The market is too competitive for good talent to put up with any BS whatsoever. You are trying to get them to leave a good place for another hopefully better place. However, there is risk because they don't know your company/have to trust you a bit. You MUST compensate for this risk.

My risk premium is easily a 25-50% salary increase. Which means I need a job to pay about $100-200k more or have significant high probability upside (IPO etc.) for me to jump all else equal (passion products maybe an exception).

If you waste my time with a job ad that doesn't tell me up front what to expect I will:

1. Not accept your interview request or offer.

2. Will flame your company throughout my entire network.

Also if you want me to do a "take home" anything that will be $500/hr with a max of 4 hours spent.

>A 2014 SAP survey found that compensation is the #1 factor that matters most to employees.

>Another survey by the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) conducted in 2013 also found that compensation and pay was the #1 factor contributing to job satisfaction

Then later,

>Several other studies have also emerged around what employees care about at work but the most recent one from Boston Consulting Group which surveyed over 200,000 people around the world is one of the most comprehensive. Unlike previous studies which may point to flexibility or salary as the top factor for job happiness, BCG found that the #1 factor for employee happiness on the job is get appreciated for their work!

I don't know much about Boston Consulting Group, but my intuition says they may have been contracted by higher-ups with the intention of finding that exact conclusion. Cynical, yes, but so often that's how these consulting-funded-research-studies end up being. I can't speak for anyone else, but compensation is still above and beyond the most important factor when considering a job.

Compensation is important because of what you can do with it outside of work.

Or, realized new hires with less experience are being payed more? Or that colleagues that are slacking are being payed the same or more?

All these feel like concerns related to pay while working. I've certainly had those thoughts and was genuinely underplayed for half my career

More like "no amount of money is enough to make me happy doing this shit"

It's also not just the programming itself. I would turn down 7 digit compensation if it was going to mean intense burn out, depression and/or anxiety due to toxic management and impossible demands. The toll that shit takes on my personal life, my families lives and the way it removes my ability to even enjoy having that money for years afterwards isn't worth it.

I just have a salary range I am aiming for, especially because I compare it to my current job where I have a permanent contract. Like the OP said, it's super annoying to go through the process and then get a low-ball offer.

I recently turned down a job at a very big company for that reason. When I said no they said it's a really good career move working for them and I would rise up fast. They have candidates begging to work there. But no I'm not taking less than I'm getting right now (after standards of living correction)

I'm not. Work is work. It's how I pay for my life. I want a job that doesn't make me miserable, and is constrained to ~40 hours per week -- but "enjoy" isn't the goal.

Making the maximum amount of money for my labor is the goal. (Without doing things that go against my ethics, or are illegal. I could make more if I had no ethical boundaries, I'm sure.) I have a family, a mortgage, pets with expensive vet needs, and a limited number of years left in my career. "Enjoyment" doesn't pay the bills, supply health coverage to my dependents or put money in the bank to cushion any economic downturns, etc.

I wish I'd had this attitude starting in my early 30s. I wouldn't be working now at all and could actually do things I enjoy with all my time and not just a sliver of it.

I bet 80% of companies would say they have above average salaries.

And it might be true. E.g., they are all paying the same, and the remaining 20% are driving the average down.

So, I am not just 'saying'. I have data. Careful research goes into making sure our employees are paid in pace or exceeding the market.

And turnover here is super high due to salary.

Every time I've encountered someone claiming they offered "aggressive" salaries, they were not in fact doing so.

Those who actually are offering aggressive salaries just put the number out there and let people decide for themselves.

Underpaying employees is a clear sign that a company tries to exploit them. So it creeps in work life balance, unlimited responsibilities, abusive management etc

It is also a clear sign that they do not value the work that these employees are doing.

So if a company pays pennies for example for ML engineers, you know that they don’t have vision to grow there, they are just checking boxes.

On the other hand if employees are greatly compensated that means that the company is looking for the greatest talent out there, so they are seriously invested in the area, aka you have good potential to grow.

Also companies that compensate great have no incentive to abuse their super stars. Exactly because they have invested a lot.

So money is the first and only measurable criterion to reject an employer before even finishing the interview loops.

Once I have a job, I’ve already agreed that the salary is adequate, or else I wouldn’t have accepted the job offer. So the salary isn’t going to be a factor for me one way or the other afterwards. But that’s a different question from whether salary is a factor before you go through the hiring process.

Maybe your company is known for paying well or well-enough, have you considered that?

> If your primary reason for responding to an ad is based upon salary you are not going to be happy where you work.

That's very debatable, and that's to say the least (and to say it politely).

For a lot of people a salary bump that eases financial pressure is a big boon on mental health, positivity and ultimately happiness.

And by the way, a lot of people will not be "happy" in the purest sense of the work at any job. Work is ultimately the chore we all do to exist. Maybe work is the ultimate chore.

We do our best to make the pill taste less sour, but very few of the people that do "code for passion" (or some other thing) would work on the same business related problem if they had no need for money. They would probably work on something else, which is very unlikely to overlap with some random jira ticket or something.

This never get's any less ridiculous the more it is repeated. It's like some sort of stockholm syndrome thing.

I'm responding to a JOB ad, the thing where you trade your time for money. There are many criteria I use to decide if I'll be happy somewhere besides money, but they are all irrelevant if I'm not properly paid because, you know, that's why I'm taking a salary job instead of doing my own thing.

It's funny how no one makes the same advice on the other side. Oh yeah, this person is incompetent, but it's not really about the work right? We are a big family, let's make him a VP because he's really fun to get a beer with.

The same logic also never seems to apply when security is escorting you out because of layoffs and treating you like a criminal. (never happened to me personally but it surely happens to A LOT of people. Like 10s of thousands in the last month)

You might not be wrong, but a higher salary makes me less miserable than a lower salary

I get where you are coming from, but at least here in Texas, a job with the title “Project Manager” can be a low-end job paying 50k to a senior position paying 250k or more. Salary is often the only way to tell them apart because the wording that recruiters use are typically identical (or very close to it).

Not sure if this is common or uncommon, but I wanted to share that sometimes these things are important for other reasons.

Regarding performance of responses I am referring to count of unique respondents meeting minimum requirements.

Regarding 'better candidates', this is based upon the count of candidates which made it through team interviews and coding challenges.

Our process requires multiple manager/leader approvals at each step of the process which is intended to reduce bias.

It is possible the soft attributes of personality and communication are reflected better in one group than the other. I do not have evidence but is a possible source of unintended bias.

People work for money, plain and simple. If the salary is not there people walk. Period. This is more than just "pay the bills" but Pay the Bills + Savings + retirement + Kids + hobbies + etc.

10 years ago the "magic number" where salary started to become less important was 75K, today (and I have not seen the research) but my guess that is closer to 100-120K before your idea of "salary is not the most important thing" comes into play, even then though it will be in the top 5 until you are well in the 1 percent category which is 400-500K +

Assuming you're discussing engineering roles, this is a dangerous attitude.

Engineering is an economic force multiplier; meaning, the monetary value of the results is worth many multiples of the monetary value of the engineering labor put in.

Seeking a fair salary upfront ensures a few things. One of the most important is the value of the result of the labor. As a top software engineer; I only want to work on products that are significantly valuable. (And then I want my fair share of the profits, too.)

I'd still apply to a unicorn, or a company who I know just raised $20M,because I know they can afford it and already pay at/above market.

Salary is not the primary reason, it's a bare minimum requirement, and if it's not completely obvious that the company is willing to pay enough, I won't click on it, let alone apply.

> with the better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges.

They responded but did the better candidates accept an offer and work for you now?

Otherwise we (Me and the recruiter) both end up wasting each other's time once I find out the salary is below market value. Honesty is key, positive company culture should be a common expectation in all roles, it's not worth sacrificing income for in my opinion.

One of the best career moves I can make is to ensure I am being paid properly for every job I accept. The most defeating experience is accepting a job that pays under market standard when roles and responsibilities are always guaranteed to increase and often become overburdening without overtime... I also live in an "At will" state, and that makes employers pretty careless about retaining me when their budgets on other projects suffer.

As a senior employee who has done everything from Development to Architecture to Proposals to Project Management, Companies often try to seek advantage for hiring me at a lower rate for just one of those skills, but then often pile on the other roles and work hard to tap my experience/knowledge/contacts for free... In cases like that, a company becomes one in the same as an employee that lied on their resume.

It's akin to being on a dating site... We all need to stop wasting each other's time and find the right matches that are well suited to each job. Listing salary is like a suitor listing their age on their dating profile... Pretty essential every time.

"Meaning, if you are looking for a place you will enjoy working, do not start with salary." Are you suggesting people go through multiple rounds of interviews with no idea of what the salary is for the position? Of course you start with salary otherwise everyone is just wasting their time. If the company does not want to discuss salary up front then there is probably a pretty good reason for that and it's not a place I want to work as this trend would likely continue come raise and promotion time as well. It's the same companies demanding loyalty and offering none.

Generally when you get people for whom salary is way down on the list, you get morons. But I think you are indeed looking for morons. So your strategy will work.

as you say, the salary is a sign of respect from your employer, and including that number in the job ad is an easy way to signal to prospective employees exactly how much you respect them.

Good sample size. This probably tells us that there isn't much difference posting salary and the people applying to each. This may be unsurprising since not posting salaries is already the norm.

> better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges

I have a feeling that this is a particularly low (and highly noisy) sample.

I think you are overstating the significance of your results.

You're conflating being happy at work and being happy to accept a job offer. You can be pretty well paid, and end up being not happy, and vice-versa.

If the offer is not good enough, the applicant won't accept it. What happens after you join a company doesn't have to be related to how much you get paid -- although it can be, sometimes.

I don't know man, if I got paid a metric *!&@ ton of money to do a really garbage job, I may very well be happy doing it for 12mo and building a big fat nest egg, or clearing major debt.

Many of us are willing to sacrifice QoL/workplace culture/etc. if the price is right. If we don't know the salary upfront, you're simply asking us to invest time and energy (and maybe even fall for a sunk cost situation) for the promise that we maybe guessed the magic number you could have told us out the gate. Not to mention if I'm talking to 2 companies I need all the information I can possibly get my hands on to make an informed decision.

We don't have to love our jobs. Some do, some don't. But you don't get to presume what motivates us or, better still, tell us our motivations are wrong. That's up to us to decide.

Paying far below the market doesn't necessarily make you a worse or better place to work for... but typically while salary won't improve how things go in a company... they are a core reason why I am even there...

Like... The comfort and performance of a car will not be affected by the price. I can love a certain car, even if it is cheaper or 20k over what it should cost. That won't matter. But I won't buy the car if I am not comfortable paying for it. The car would be just as great, but if it was out of my price range, I am still suffering for it.

Now cars are priced relatively close to their actual worth, and all car prices are well known vs hidden behind 7 hours of interviews and "don't talk about your salary" policies. So this is the playing field we're creating with salaries being up-front.

I have turned down many job interviews because I said my salary requirements during our opening call. Sure it wasn't part of the posting, but it better be an early conversation otherwise why would I leave a comfortable job for a lower pay?

When people respond to online job postings, it is often because they are already really unhappy, or need a job because they lost theirs, so the numbers may be skewed due to needs.

So what is my point? idk... probably recruiter outreach should have salary info. For job postings... my bet is recruiters know response rates better than I do. :P

Edit: Post interviews, I have taken lower paying job offers compared to other offers because after talking to the teams I predicted the money was worth losing over happiness. So money is certainly isn't everything, but it is an important aspect. I assure you I will deal with extra stress for 500k because I know at home I'll get the support needed and the extra money will change our lives. But would I do the same for 10k? hell no.

Tell us the numbers. Otherwise I call bullshit…

Let's see your salary range numbers and what tier you fall under.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

Are you in Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3?

Are you paying your mid-level engs over $200k total when including stock and bonus? That's the minimum benchmark I would use for my next job hunt. 120k+ for juniors, 200k+ for mid, 300k+ for senior, 400k+ for anything above senior.

Care to mention what they are? Because I suspect your ranges are out of line with industry standards that have risen quite rapidly.

I know because I've started responding to any recruiters that sound interesting asking for comp ranges and they are all below my current base, let alone TC.

If the upper bound of your range doesn't exceed $350k there is no chance that any of the senior engineers I know will apply and honestly to get something to think about leaving a job they are moderately happy with you'd have to have that be the lower bound of your range.

But I suspect you're posting ranges that are less than or barely over 200k at the upper end.

Outside of SV, that upper-bound is an absolutely wild number.

An insane number of startups have IPO'd in the last two years, and even with stock drops a lot of people suddenly have RSUs. In addition the rise in remote work has meant that near SV pay is much easier to obtain. Very few of my friends live in SV and I only know a few who aren't making at least that amount at the senior level.

That number is not at all wild for an upper-bound.

OP was discussing salary range, not total comp--but I'd be a little surprised to find that even TC at the $350k range at the top outside of SV firms is quite high.

I'm not totally persuaded by levels.fyi, but looking at metros at 90th percentile of SWE total comp:

  Bay Area - 425k
  Los Angeles - 325k
  NYC - 343k
  Denver - 298k
  Boston - 273k
  Austin - 268k
  Chicago - 260k
  NoVA / DC - 237k
  Salt Lake City - 221k
  Columbus, OH - 215k
  Phoenix - 213k
  Minneapolis/St Paul - 210k
  Philadelphia - 210k
  Houston - 209k
  Kansas City - 152k

I'd also be interested to see a breakdown based on the company type. There's room for SWEs in many companies, and the rates might break differently based on whether software is the primary product.

So right off the bat I'm not sure the point you're making. If the upper limit you are willing to pay does not exceed the 90th percentile TC, by definition you are not offering "very aggressive" pay. There are tons of mediocre, low paying software jobs out there, but posting that you are one of those is not going to attract more applicants. OP claims they are not one of those companies, and I disagree.

Second your numbers there aren't conditioning on seniority, and additionally given not only population size but proportion of tech jobs available the Bay area and NYC account for the majority of software jobs out there.

My point still stands that OPs company is in fact not offering "very aggressive" comp. Ignoring seniority (which will be weighted by more junior roles) not having the upper bound of comp being in the 90% means you are not really offering aggressive pay in the most major software markets.

> So right off the bat I'm not sure the point you're making.

That 350k yearly salary is a high number. Attainable, sure, but high, and not representative of typical SWE jobs for most people, senior-level included. Not that people cannot or don't make that, but that it's probably not the norm.

> If the upper limit you are willing to pay does not exceed the 90th percentile TC, by definition you are not offering "very aggressive" pay.

What qualifies as "very aggressive"? 99th? How is this determined? What, typically, is a business's approach towards determining salary ranges for positions?

FAANGs perhaps don't have to observe that approach, I suppose, given their resourcing and scale, but in my experience it's done by market comps.

> Second your numbers there aren't conditioning on seniority,

Fair enough: it does have an impact on the percentiles. I can't easily get them from Levels thanks to the relatively coarse granularity, but a couple quick observations:

In the Bay Area, the top 100 salaries for 5-10 YOE ("senior engineer" per Levels) have substantially higher rates of total comp: $710k-2+M (n=1 here). Most of this is not base salary (which topped out short of $400k) but stock and bonus.

Top 100 in NYC are similar, though smaller proportionately (tops out at 1.5M TC, N=1).

Top 100 in NoVA/DC is markedly lower (tops out at $500k TC).

> and additionally given not only population size but proportion of tech jobs available the Bay area and NYC account for the majority of software jobs out there.

With respect to where SW Eng jobs are located, that's a great question. I'm not sure how to quantify this very well, but for grins, I tried searching for senior-level positions on Indeed and LinkedIn.

Indeed found ~33k jobs, of which ~12k are represented in the locations on which I could filter. Of those 12k, 6021 were on the coasts (I counted anything in Washington, California, NoVA, NYC as coastal jobs but excluded lower-cost areas like Atlanta); I realize not all of these are in SV proper, but I think it probably captures the idea of high-cost/high-value markets for SWEs, and it makes the numbers more favorable against my point above. 3087 were listed as remote.

It's not well controlled, but Indeed's numbers suggest about 20% are in SV or SV-lite areas, and about 10% remote.

LinkedIn's job filters are maybe a bit more sophisticated? but don't offer the same sort of numerical granularity. I picked senior+ SW titles in the US (so included Lead, Principal), of which 43k+ hits were returned. The top ten markets they offer for search (Seattle, Austin, Boston, Atlanta, Charlotte, NYC, San Fran, Chicago, Sunnyvale, and LA) account for 11k results, about 25%. Excluding low-cost areas (Charlotte and Atlanta) returns 9K results, also about 20%.

So I don't feel terribly uncomfortable positing that of widely-advertised jobs, the high-value markets might account for 20-25% of the SWE job market. This is not a vast majority. The numbers could be off, of course--these aren't scientific samples, the searches will naturally have an impact on results, etc. But I don't think most people in software are working in SV, and I don't think most seniors routinely sniff a $350k salary.

Doesn't mean that the OP (GP? GGP?) is paying aggressively or that advertising salary or total comp is a bad idea--just that my initial reaction that $350 is a lot--seems like a reasonable take.

I know lots of people who would consider applying to your senior role, all else being good, if you're offering, say $250k or so -- but none of them are the people on my mental list of senior engineering contacts. Still, you might hire one of my mid-level engineering contacts, and you might be happy with them, since if you're paying only around $250k (or even only $350k) you probably won't have many of the other group to compare with (and all of the people whose names I'm thinking of are all great engineers)

---

* assuming we're talking total compensation.

That's fine--it's still a large number, and most roles simply don't pay it. There are, I'm sure, many openings that can pay sufficiently qualified people quite a lot of money, multiples of $350k. But it's a high number.

Were these better candidates within the budgeted salary range though? Or were they priced too high?

This is essentially Tinder “swipe left or right” and it should treated that way.

Salary can be both a filter and a sorter.

- I won't apply to a job that pays less than I need to support the life style I want; no other factor can overcome that.

- I am more likely to apply for a job that pays more than a different job, but other things are also part of that sort.

It is entirely possible for salary to be an important part of what is considered when deciding on a job, even a deciding factor, without it being the only thing or even the primary thing.

Either way, it feels questionable to draw much signal from the process.

Interview loops are an enormous investment of time these days. I'm not going to take one unless I'm confident the offer will come out in an acceptable range.

Maybe you can fool some people with less experience or market power by not giving them the comp info upfront. But not the best.

And don't be surprised when any truly talented folks among your hires leave much earlier than you hoped. Karma.

Put another way, I'd rather work somewhere that's investing heavily in tech talent and also has good market fit. Stock tends to go up at places like that, so it had better be a big chunk of the offer. This makes total comp impossible to predict, and therefore hard to put in a single number.

The issue is the companies out there with low salary ranges. And while it's absolutely true that a high salary isn't going to make an otherwise bad job great, too low a salary will make an otherwise great job terrible.

So I'm not really surprised that your company wouldn't see much value from publishing salary ranges, but I don't think that means they have no value.

Also on a side note:

> Of the top reasons people are happy at work, salary is way down on the list.

That's a weird link to give as evidence of that, since it immediately covers two different surveys that found compensation was the number 1 factor, before going on to discuss a third survey that found it was important, just not #1...

What I'm willing to do, however, is a whole bunch of stuff, as long as that "stuff" gives me a better ability to do those things that do make me happy, and a primary driver of my ability to do the things I like is how much money I have.

Happiness doesn't really factor into it, because as I said, the items at the top of the list of things that make me happy are nonstarters from an income perspective.

It's delusional, as an employer, to think your job is to make the people who work for you "happy" in some objective sense.

Nobody would be there if you weren't paying them, you need very badly to remind yourself of that.

This doesn't even touch on people who _have_ to prioritize salary.

This is true, but at the same time, if you're trying to hire people for $X, and I currently make $3X or more, it is probably not worthwhile for us to spend much time exploring working together.

For the most part, I can tell whether you're likely to be vaguely close based on discussing the role with you. It's a bit of a signaling game, but I can usually tell if we're at least kinda-sorta close -- but at the same time I've definitely gotten well into the process with folks only to discover that we're so far apart that it doesn't matter what the role or company is like.

It was a waste of everyone's time. Providing salary information isn't about finding the ideal place but filtering out the places that aren't in the same ballpark.

It's not really clear what "primary" means here. It's certainly one of my primary concerns.

> Of the top reasons people are happy at work, salary is way down on the list.

Okay, but that doesn't mean that if the salary were zero they would take the job. It just means that they have enough options within their acceptable salary range that they also considered other factors.

Asking whether salary is the primary reason for choosing a job is a bit like asking if width is the primary reason for choosing a storage unit.

Your experiment is not valid because you are not controlling for the job market environment. However as the job market environment evolves to offer more data, the job postings with less data will suffer.

We already see this pattern in other markets such as housing/cars. More information makes the posting more attractive to the extent that there is whole industries dedicated to offering more information about postings, ex: carfax. The job market is not different.

I want money so my family don’t struggle in the future. My child can go to better schools. We have better food. We can have a house at better places. When you only work to pay your bills you gonna have a bad time. What happens when you get fired? What happens when you want to change your perspective and go to school again.

I’ll regularly take specific language from a job posting and search on it to see what information is where.

The problem is that no one wants to apply to a job where the salary isn’t viable for them.

Amongst the 50 other things they don’t know about a role and company, most of them you need to talk about in an interview, but item #1: salary, is make or break, and can be answered before even applying.

It’s disrespectful to candidates not to put a range on the ad.