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Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?
558 points by roflyear on Dec 13, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 348 comments
I saw a few ads here for hiring over the last month for YC companies in NYC that did not post their salary range, and clicking through to the post on their portal the range was also nowhere to be found.

I can't comment on those posts, so I wasn't able to do any type of callout. I thought I remember being able to comment on them, but I think that functionality was removed ...

Why is this acceptable?




Keep in mind many of the salary transparency laws have minimum employee counts before they come into effect, and iirc, the new york one requires an existing employee being located there before it comes into effect.

I'm firmly on the side of salary transparency, even if a company technically doesn't have to because of its size - but I suspect many of the YC companies in question here are small enough to not be affected by some of these laws.


Great answer to my question thank you


Specifically, the NY law affects companies with at least 4 employees (including owners/founders).


I've been in the job board / HR Tech space for a while, and every time I see a state pass a law requiring advertising the salary range, I'm reminded of a few facts:

* Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.

* If you don't give the job board a salary range, they will use tools like salary.com or their own tools to show an "estimated salary range" on your job so they pick up more clicks when they syndicate your job to other sources (i.e. email alerts and other job boards).

* If you are uncompetitve on wages, fix it. Even though there's a lot of doom and gloom out there, the truth is that unemployment did not go up in November.

* If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.


> * If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.

My experience with being hired at non-FAANG places over a career of more than two decades is that I'm usually through a process and hired within a week. Often, like three days, from first contact to offer. I think my single longest job search was maybe a month, total. Companies that have these weeks- or months-long processes but don't pay FAANG-tier wages to make it worth the wait, I have no idea how the hell they manage to hire anyone at all. You've got to move or I'll already be looking at two other offers before you set the date for your second round or WTF ever.


I routinely hire developers in 24 hours from initial contact. It's fun watching them get random recruiter calls two or three weeks later. "I'm not interested, I STARTED my new job three weeks ago. No, I'm not willing to leave for that. Have a nice day." Except the "Have a nice day" part is usually less friendly and polite.


How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time? I was hired by my current employer in less than 2 weeks from initial conversation and it was a bit of a smell that they weren't more thorough. Now I'm a hiring manager and am a little concerned with what I feel are "loose" practices that let too many marginal candidates through because otherwise "it's too hard to source talent".

For me a clear understanding of the process steps and how long it will take start to finish is more important than absolute speed. Example: "These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur." My last employeer was really good at communicating promptly with those that were not progressing, which is also very important.

I think we should all agree that limbo/ghosting is totally unacceptable and these companies (or people) should be called out by name.


You read the candidates CV, you ask them what they last worked on, ask them why they want to work at your company, if they are okay with the posted salary range. Maybe have them write a short bit of code to make sure they aren't totally bullshitting you.

That takes about one or two hours.

Then you think about it, and if you want to hire them send them an offer the next day.

First 3 months of the contract is trial period (you can fire them without severance in the trial period if it doesn't work out).

Not sure why you need weeks to evaluate a candidate, either they are a fit or not.


Agree - most of the interviews I have had have been 1-2 hours plus some sort of coding test or similar. I guess if you are trying to recruit people already in a job, you can't get away with that much more than that - unless the job is super-amazing, you can expect people to take a day off work but not more than that. I don't know that longer interviews etc. would actually have told the interviewers massively more about me, perhaps a tiny bit more but not a lot.


> How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time?

There is little evidence that longer interview cycles produce better results.

"Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship."

- https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...


Consider the number of hours you actually spend interacting with a candidate during the interview process. If it's 40(!), bring them in for a full week and decide at the end of Friday. If it's closer to 10, bring them in Monday morning and decide by close of business Tuesday.

All the delays are materially the fault of glitches in the hiring organization.


This is a good process to ensure you don’t hire anyone who is currently employed. I would not sign up for this even if I was between jobs unless I was desperate. I don’t mind coding challenges, etc, but the first few weeks at any job is mostly scut work getting things set up, meeting people, etc.


I was sort of being facetious with the 40 hours thing. Nobody really gets 40 hours of interaction of a candidate before hiring. More typical is closer to 5-8, which means they can make a decision in a single day.

Edit: even an intense 6-interview loop including a "sell" dinner can be done in a day if scheduled properly. The multiple weeks thing is entirely poor scheduling on the part of the company.


5-8 still seems like a lot t me. 1-3 has been more typical of my experience.


3 tech interviews, lunch with team or other colleague, followed by general corporate HR interview and a "sell" session all fit neatly into a single business day.


This is great for 1 candidate. Say you have 20 applications at once? Do you pick the one with the best CV and dedicate this week for them. Or try to do a filter stage? Not saying I have the answer, but it is not as simple as chucking all your resources at all the candidates full time.


> Say you have 20 applications at once?

Yes, a filter should happen first. A 30/60 minute phone screen to determine who to bring in for the full interview set. Then, what companies did back in the 90s was to take a day (say Friday) and blitz through interviews that day. (Do companies still do this?) You will pull people from their normal work to do this, but conversely you don't lose applicants because your process leaves them hanging too long.


To add anecdata to your post here, in the height of the hiring craze last year, I accepted an "above-market" (from my perspective) offer from a company called Provi. They took less than a week from initial recruiter call to offer.

Fast forward to this past February, and I'm being let go for "performance reasons", but it's a lot clearer in retrospect that I should've been failed out of their interview process if it was any good, and that seeking to hire someone within a week is now sort of a yellow flag for me.

I want to move fast, but I also want my counter-party to do proper due diligence.


What do you think they should have asked you that would have properly filtered you out?


I don't know - isn't that the employer's problem, not mine?

I was let go two weeks after they acquired a competitor. They claimed it was my performance that was the reason I was being let go, but when you have zero "negative performance" conversations with your manager despite having regular weekly/semi-weekly 1-1s, it's clear to me "performance" was not the driving issue.


Are you sure that wasn't a spot of impostor syndrome? Or do you think it was just a bad culture fit?


They acquired a competitor, doubling their headcount. Two weeks later, I was being let go.


How long did it take them to let you go?


I was there four months in total. They acquired a competitor two weeks before I was let go. I can connect the dots.


>How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time?

Hmm? you just perform 1-2h interview and decide?

>These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur."

Why would you need N technical interviews to decide whether somebody is worth their money?


You have to get these three things right:

* Define what a hireable candidate is so you aren't paralyzed in deciding who to give offers to and can be confident in screening.

* Front-load objective screening. Don't wait until after the interview to do a code test. Hiring managers should know what they've got, and focus on

* Make sure hiring managers understand their role in the process and are not running a different hiring process than the recruiting team so expectations can be met.


So you spend significantly more than a day on assessment for each individual candidate? Because if you don't, quick turnaround times are mostly a scheduling problem.


How often do you actually learn something material after the first hour of interviewing? In my experience almost never.


> How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time?

Given the state of tech interviews, and what can be objectively determined _at all_, what makes you think more time would give you any more accurate assessment?


In most small companies you send in your CV, they bring you in for an interview, chat for an hour or so and get an offer the next day. The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.


> The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.

This is a very detached view from the reality. The only reason for the company to spend that much time on the interview process is to reduce the rate of "false positives" as it's deemed very expensive at the big tech. Avoiding individual accountability is not the reason


It is a structural property of committees. They dilute blame.

Not OP, I do not mean that there is an evil confabulation for this to happen, but if you have a hiring committee, this is happening. Even if it would reduce the amount of bad candidates (which is not a given at all), both effects can happen simultaneously.


This is true, but I'd still rather come in for an entire day and interview with 6 different people and get a thumbs up/down the same or next day versus come in for a single 1 hr interview then get called back for a second interview a few days later and then a third interview a week after that and then not get a decision for a week or two after the final interview. The latter used to be way more common with non-tech companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s.


I'm starting to come around to the TikTok suggestion for those tense closers. "Have the day you deserve."


There also seems to be a scam industry forming to take advantage of those quick moves plus remote work. If one such scam employee makes it to the first salary, it already more than paid for the few hours spent on interviews and communicating excuses why he doesn't get anything done. Also interviews and pretending to work can be spread out to specialists within a team.

Now do the math for multiple interviews per working day for someone who is decent in interviewing...

We had the same guy show up to scam interviews under different names twice! LOL


I started a new job in April. The hiring process was quite slow and disorganized, but included in that were three separate "interviews" with my now-manager.

I thought this was great - I felt like I really understood who I'd be working for and what I was getting into. And now that I've joined I understand that he was simply doing the same thing: getting to know me; making sure I wasn't someone good at technical interviews but with misaligned values. Hiring the wrong person can be very expensive.

I wish the whole process had taken 2 weeks rather than 6, but I'd view an offer in 24h as a huge red flag.


3 times with the same person? Yikes.. this is a much bigger red flag than getting hired in 24 hours. That tells me they are unsure of me or themselves getting an offer on the spot is a sign they actually need to fill the position and they believe you can


To me it just sounds like a small scale operation and the manager is being careful which is great.

Perhaps what happened after the first two meetings, the manager sat down and analyzed his list of reasons he's excited about the candidate as well as any potential concerns that he saw.

The subsequent rounds may have in part been structured to dig into the areas of concerns to assure themselves they aren't real issues or can be lived with.

This wouldn't scale at a FAANG but for a smaller shop it's probably close to optimal.

I didn't marry my wife after our first date :)


It was for a pretty senior role. Having joined, it was clearly not a red flag in hindsight; it didn't hunt at any actual dysfunction AFAICT.


This! It happened to me on my last job search. Was talking with three companies and two of the had the usual 4-6 meetings across 2-3 weeks stuff… the one I accepted did two interviews (technical and with PMs) and had an offer for me about 1 hour after I finished the last interview. I was blown away and the other companies couldn’t really compete, nor they were affecting anything so much better that would be worth the wait!


How do you deal with people lying on their resume? I'm curious what your hiring process looks like.


I have been through a process that took 4 months, from start to end, with almost two months of silence between. The only reason I knew I wasn't rejected was I had a friend on the inside.


I've been on the other side of a hiring process like that.

It literally went like this:

"Oh shit, didn't we interview so and so for that like 3 weeks ago? Oops! Are they still available?"


I had a 4 month hiring process - but in fairness they were very transparent. Early on in the process I was warned it would take a long time, and at each step along the way it was made clear what was happening. There was never a feeling of being half ghosted.

Wasn’t a bad experience at all.


I got a new job long before COVID--so mostly in-person process--and it was about a 3 month process. But a lot of it was I was interviewing with people who traveled a lot and getting on calendars even with flexibility on my part (I was very local) just took time.


They hire closer to average talent, who will typically wait because they don't have offers swarming in. The places that hire fast and choose good talent often screen those folks out.


I've seen the other side of this and it's not pretty. We had a round with a very indecisive manager who seemed to be apprehensive that an even better candidate might come along next week.

We interviewed 15-20 people over the run of 3 months, finally decided on someone and got in touch with them. They'd already taken a role. Tried our second choice. Then our third. Then we just started over.

Unless the candidate is looking for you in particular, the better than candidate, the sooner they'll be off the market. The only candidates still waiting 3 months later are the ones everyone else has passed over.

(This isn't particularly recent, and wasn't in the US. It's just stuck in my mind as a particularly educational experience.)


It would help things immensely if people were more honest. Sometimes it takes more than a week to verify everything on their resume. References often don't get back ASAP. It's not like we won't ever find out that they were lying about their previous job. There are always some applicants who talk a lot, take credit for others' work, but can't actually anything.


I work in such a company; it is easy to hire, there are people that FAANG does not hire, other companies don't hire, but somewhere at the bottom someone does. The entire industry that I work in (non-IT, but very large companies) do this, it is the practice for the past ~ 15 years and there is a non-compete agreement on this.


By the time a previous employer got around to making an offer, I had already interviewed and accepted a different job and been working there for 2 months. Still, I took the job for the 1.5x salary increase and better benefits.


Even FAANGs can pull this off. Amazon was routinely hiring folks in single-day loop with offer letter the following morning, back when I joined.


Likely you had a very particular set of (in-demand) skills. Right? What year was this?


I think it's rather the opposite: If it's a very generic position, to which a lot of applicants could match. In this case big companies often do hiring events, where a lot of applicants are interviewed at the same day, and potentially in the same physical location. Since for those hiring events all decision makers (interviewers, hiring manager, recruiting) are available at the same day, the process can be faster.


Not the person you responded to, but same story for me in 2007. Loop and verbal offer the same day. I was/am not a big get, just a regular engineer.


> A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.

I've noticed my interest in a job tends to drop consistently the longer it takes for a response. This isn't surprising at all. I don't think it's because we're fickle, it's more that right when you apply you can picture what it might be like to start working for the company and start to identify with that future. As the days drag on, that picture seems less and less likely to happen.


> I've noticed my interest in a job tends to drop consistently the longer it takes for a response.

As a software engineer with a long track record, I somehow only just realized this about myself within the last couple months.

With the two fresh data points I have in mind, it wasn't about perceived likelihood of an offer, but about perceived likelihood of it being a good situation if I accepted the offer.

Delays (especially after a great initial call) can be felt as signal about how much they value the role, whether they're excited about me specifically for it (both of which can make the difference between a great role and an awful one), and how well they can execute (e.g., do they have a clout deficit or a huge-corporate bureaucracy that would also be a problem getting things done there).

And if there's a recruiter, HR middleperson, or other communication barrier -- blocking the normal ability to read people and pick up on clues, from direct interaction with a hiring manager or team member -- this signal can be all we have to go on.


This, to me, is a really good signal of how well run a company is. After all, a company is merely a collection of people on whom its outcomes are entirely dependent. Thus, the single most important function a company can perform is hiring. If a company fails to recognize this or just does it incompetently, its probably a crappy company. Thus, slow responses == crappy company.


I would postulate the single most important thing a company can do is make money. Hiring is also important though.


Making money at all costs usually implies a shitty culture that I personally seek to avoid.


Nobody said at all costs.


Maybe.

But whatever the goal of your organization, achieving that goal is going to depend on the people you hire.


I wish every organization had read that memo :)


Making money is a downstream output of the activities of your people. So, if making money is your goal, the most important thing you can do to reach your goal is to hire the right people.


If you want to hire the right people, you need to be making enough money to pay them.


> I would postulate the single most important thing a company can do is make money.

Nobody in the company "makes money" (unless the company is a bank, then they literally do, by giving out loans). The people perform various functions and the money made or lost by the company is a result of a sum total of their actions.


Companies with poor hiring likely don't make money. There maybe a select few that have such a desirable product that they cannot help themselves. Usually that is short lived as competition eats your lunch because your crappy employees cannot adapt.


"Making money" is the result of doing everything else well.

It's not difficult to find companies that cut costs in order to increase profits only for it to backfire and result in less money or even bankruptcy.


More importantly, as I remind my mentees, it's is an excellent signal for true interest. Nothing burns more than getting your hopes up and investing hours/days into a job interview process only to find out you were not the preferred candidate. This stings a bit if you don't get the job, becomes seriously annoying when it surfaces during compensation negotiation, and can be disastrous for your career and personal life if it surfaces post-hiring.


Definitely noticed this effect when applying now too.

Additionally a responsive and clearly communicating company is always a good sign that they really need to fill the role. It is always a plus if I go from hiring manager/recruiter straight upper management interviews in a matter of days.

Additionally the quicker the employer response the more likely the applicant is mentally primed for the responder and does not yet have their mental/time bandwidth taken by competitors.


It's kinda nice to hear that things that sound obvious actually are. All these seem like they can be summed up with: treat your potential hire like you'd want to be treated when you're looking for a job. Would it be naive to assume that similar rules apply for retaining workers?


> the truth is that unemployment did not go up in November.

Do you have a source on this that breaks out unemployment by sector? 100k tech sector layoffs could be easily overshadowed by holiday season retail hiring.


You can dive through US DOL JOLTS report if you want to understand this. Big tech did layoffs. IT departments still need people.


While both IT and engineering jobs in Big Tech involve computer technology, IT tends to be a cost center while Big Tech’s engineering groups are profit centers. (Or supposed to be).

It would be interesting to compare the unemployment numbers to comp.


you'd think it's on the person making the statement about IT hiring numbers to do the diving.


It's a pain to link to the BLS data, since you have to generate a report which needs POST data in order to display properly.

I went and found the data and it maps with what indymike is saying. Layoffs are up, but not abnormally so (in line with previous years), while hiring is down compared to last year, it remains well above pre-2020 figure.

Overall, it looks like the IT job market is the best its ever been by a 20% margin, aside from 2021, which was slightly better than this year.


He did the diving, he told you the statement and the properties of it and he told you where he gets his data.


Unemployment is tracked on a seasonally adjusted basis to account for such things.


> Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.

This is one number, which even if it is true doesn’t matter. There are so many easy way to increase the number of applicants like posting it in linkedin, decreasing number of years of experience in posting(which are more often than not, not a hard limit for job) etc. They want to decrease the applicants if at all while keeping the number of new hires same.


> If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly

A friend of mine is superbly qualified for a job posted by Apple. She applied for this job expecting a reasonably quick reply. What I mean by "superbly qualified" is that she is a recognized expert in the domain, has conducted seminars attended by hundreds of engineers and business people and, back in the day, was actually invited by Steve Jobs to come to Cupertino and help Apple engineers understand issues related to this product category.

Her application, last I checked, has gone without response for somewhere around 30 to 45 days. This has caused her to have lost her interest to work for Apple. She is now considering offers from competitors.

Ghosting can happen in many forms. Why is it that tech companies don't seem to understand how important is is to treat people with respect --customers, suppliers, candidates and employees. Once someone forms an opinion about you or your company it takes a thousand times more energy and effort to change it.


I feel for your friend but this sounds naive.

Public job postings get hundreds or thousands of applications, most of which are terrible and need to be filtered out. Expecting an immediate response on one is not reasonable.

If your friend is such an industry insider, it's surprising she didn't have a network that could short circuit this process for her.

In general, my experience that if you are cold-applying for a job, you are very likely to get lost in a pile of trash. The recruiting experience is much better if the company finds out about you on their own and goes after you. Having an internal referral is a form of that.


Expecting a response to your job application in less than a month sounds naive?


Month does sound long to me, but "a few weeks" isn't crazy given the reality on the ground.

Note, I am not saying this is good or how it ought to be, I am just saying how it is.

Let me ask you - if you were the recruiter at Apple and let's say you owned 5 roles each of which got 2000 resumes (I am stabbing at a number but it's Apple, so likely tons of people jump on every role) - how long would it take you to get through it all?

Back of the envelope: 5 roles x 2k resumes = 10k resumes. If it took you just one minute to read a resume and you did nothing but read them every day for 10 hours that's like 17 working days = so 3+ weeks.

Keep in mind that this pile of resumes is your lowest likelihood of success pile - these are not the people you'd identified priori as targets, they weren't even internally referred, they are just mainly random people spamming you or are very weakly qualified. It "doesn't matter" if one of them is a diamond in the rough like the op was describing - it might take you weeks to get to their resume, and that's only if you don't fill the role w someone from the higher bandwidth channel.

So like I said, not "great" but - what would you do differently if you were HR here?


Pull out 200 of each set, or whatever number you like. Email the other 1800 and say "thanks, but we have decided not to interview you for this role. We'll keep your resume and contact you again if we have a role that you seem good for". Read all the remaining resumes over the next week.

Seriously, it isn't complicated.


And for all the AI prowess these large companies purport to have, I would expect a very efficient automated first-pass filter to significantly reduce the search space.

Also, there are roles --where time and expertise are a requirement-- that cannot possibly get thousands of legitimate applicants. Some not even hundreds.


> what would you do differently if you were HR here?

Hire more HR staff to reduce queue times? Apple literally has $100b+ of cash that they don't know what to do with, they could spend some of it on improving their hiring.


Expecting any response to dropping your resume into a online form sounds naive IMO. Does anyone actually get jobs this way?


> if you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application

i mean it's nice to get a response as soon as possible but this seems completely unrealistic... it seems perfectly normal to expect a wait of a few days or weeks to me


> i mean it's nice to get a response as soon as possible but this seems completely unrealistic

If you run recruiting like it is important, making sure recruiters and hiring managers have the tools and time to talk to candidates quickly is really easy to do. A lot of companies run recruiting like it's a surprise when they have to hire or view it as less important than other functions... and then put lines like "our people are our greatest assets" on their careers page.


If a customer rang would you pick up the phone right away?

Why not treat your potential staff as more important than any of your customers?

Which is harder to acquire? Customers or Staff?


> Which is harder to acquire? Customers or Staff?

Customers. By far.


Most people who respond to job ads are actively searching for jobs, they usually apply to multiple places simultaneously. If the other places responded quickly then, by the time you responded in a few days, the applicant could be far along the interviewing with several others and might not be considering your vacancy any more or prioritize it after everything else already in the pipeline. If you responded in a few weeks, the applicant might already have taken an offer.


weeks would drag the application out for months though


>* If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.

Related: apply to jobs during [earlyish] business hours whenever possible - you're a lot more likely to hear back in a timely manner

Don't apply at 9pm on Friday night if you can avoid it


Thanks for posting those recruiting stats, they certainly seem to hold true from what I've seen.


no opinion about these laws but:

> * Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.

might not be what you want. You might want the best engineers who you will have to make exceptions for in their TC


My unsolicited advice (for founders) is to hire the best people you can afford.

I've seen startups blow 2-3 headcount worth of budget to secure a FAANG engineer, only to realize that engineer needed an SRE to deploy their code, a tools engineer to setup their CI/CD, etc. The founders were so excited to add "FAANG engineer" to their Series A deck.

Firing this engineer was tough because the startup went to the board to get approval for the salary + equity offer letter. To make matters worse, this engineer was kept on for 6+ months without shipping anything ... because firing would've gone into the next board and investor update.


A CEO eventually has to develop the courage to deliver bad news to the board.


100% agreed, but for the CEO's who are making the above mistake, if they have other bad news to deliver to the board (low revenues, etc), then they might be afraid to deliver yet another piece of bad news on the hiring side.


Yep, and a mis-hire is one of the easiest problems to push off. You can talk yourself into believing the first project wasn't a good fit, your management skills aren't good so it's your fault, and so on.

All of those things might even be true! But doesn't change the reality that you're burning 2-3 engineers of runway on 1 engineer with no valuable outputs.


It's a range. If you are hoping to hire someone outside that range, you're lying about your range. If you're worried about the 1% chance you'll end up hiring outside that range, you probably need to just get over it.


This is really besides the point and in this context seems to argue it would be fine to break the law if it were beneficial, it just happens that it's not the case.


To those who think it's not YC / HN's problem, you're missing that HN literally has a Job Board: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

This is a core part of their offering, it's not just user generated content, it's YC companies posting on YC's job board.


It's deeply bizarre to me that there are so many posters on here who think a fund that: 1) invests in, 2) advises, and 3) provides free job advertising to; various startups, has no responsibility to advise them to follow the law when posting those job advertisements on that fund's own job board.

I understand the ones who raise the possibility that some of these aren't, in fact, breaking the law, for one reason or another, but the ones who seem to take offense at the notion that YC might have even a sliver of responsibility here in the first place are really surprising.


Squeaky wheel gets the grease. Never assume someone will do the right or legal thing, regardless of status or PR. Can’t explain the Stockholm Syndrome (“but the ones who seem to take offense at the notion that YC might have even a sliver of responsibility here”), people can be emotional, irrational creatures due to life experience and belief systems.

But Sequoia lost $200M on a fraud having done zero due diligence, so perhaps it’s simply different shades of apathy all the way down.


I'm glad this took off. I think some of the posts were fixed!! :)


Just out of curiosity - how do you know that YC doesn't advise startups to do exactly that? Advice can be ignored, after all.

(Note: I'm not saying they are or aren't, I have no idea either way.)


in Silicon Valley style "first principles thinking", you start from the premise that laws don't exist. Airbnb and Uber wouldn't exist if their backers urged them to comply with state laws.


Do we know why the Who's Hiring threads stopped encouraging wage posting? Wasn't there a template? I remember there also used to be a user led effort to upvote those who posted salaries and downvote those who didn't.


The craziest one is The Muse, which is NYC based, and is literally a jobs board, but does not list salary for its own jobs. Doesn't inspire confidence!


Lol missed that one!


Isn't that the benefit of hackernews to ycombinator?

You have an incredible reach with highly technical users, and you can inject your hiring ads into the posts.


OP is likely referring to the "Who is Hiring?" posts. Those offerings are user-generated and likely fall under Section 230. Even if that weren't the case, New York City has no juridiction over a company's speech in the Bay Area.


They clearly are not given the explicit mention of these being YC companies combined with the lack of the ability to comment on the posts, which is only ever true of the special job postings from YC companies that get placed on the front page without needing to be upvoted.

They are also clear that they are talking about companies based in NYC that are clearly required to follow NY law.


Unless you are a lawyer it does not seem prudent to err on the side of “don’t worry about it” when it comes to the law. I’m also not a lawyer but this is the kind of thing companies get slapped with fines for all the time.


No, I mean the job ads that are sometimes promoted.


A friend of mine asked about one of these recently and they wouldn't give him a salary range, so he reported them to the attorney general and they immediately put one on their website. Can't hurt to ask (although in that case they may only give it to you, if they do, move on to step 2 anyways), then if they don't update it report them and you'll be doing everyone else a favor too.


Is there a link for reporting to the attorney general?


Yes[0]!

[0]https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...


I found an example on today's front page (Rutter): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rutter/7b222f5f-cd46-4592-9cf8-6cd1...

No salary range posted, job is in NYC.


14 minutes later, it now has a salary range:

> $175K-210K base compensation

'Post about the problem on HN' shows its power once again.


Now let's see if they add maternity leave to their list of benefits. They add paternity leave, but do they expect all applicants to be male?


Now it's "parental leave" :)


I suspect it was a mistake/typo (someone confused "paternity" for the general term).


Probably this. I'm also second guessing myself that _I_ didn't read it wrong lol


Fun to watch young tech companies learn how to do HR in real time!


Just call it parental leave and cover all bases.


This seems low for 5+ YoE in NYC


It says base comp, 200k is quite a normal base salary. There could be 300k equity too, who knows.

But yes, industry comp will decline if layoffs pick up steam. I've already noticed a tremendous easing in being able to hire competent people


That's because there's no penalty for paying someone outside of the range...so it's mostly posturing bullshit.


Salary is much higher than most corporate IT jobs in NYC.


Hey sorry about that this is our job posting - we duplicated a another one and missed adding that information, thanks for catching that! We added in the salary range. Feel free to email us if you have any other questions!


To be fair, this law should be enforced on the platforms as well where if selected location = NYC, salary range field must be filled out. Seems like they just added the salary range as text in the description. I would put some more burden on these hiring platforms as well.


Didn't mean to call you out specifically, just wanted to see if OP was correct. Thanks for being so responsive, it's a good sign for applicants!


Well done for acknowledging it and correcting it so quickly. Mistakes happen, especially at startups.


Why not add it by default?


> Why not add it by default?

IIUC, it's generally held that in a price negotiation, the first party that posts a number is at a disadvantage. Starting salary is one kind of price negotiation. So I can understand why employers would be reluctant to do that.


Yeah, this isn’t correct. All things being equal, the first to post a number is at a big advantage. As another commenter pointed out, this is called anchoring. Think about a house being sold in a normal market, the price is always well above its market value to anchor the numbers high.

The reason companies don’t want to post a salary number is all things aren’t equal: they have far more information on pay than you do. Vastly more. So they have the luxury of letting your uninformed ask be the anchor point cause they know it’ll probably be low. Plus, if someone asks too high, they can ignore it and move on. They (often but not always) have the luxury of choosing the lowest asks to move forward with.


Also they might be underpaying their current staff.


This is the truth of it. They have devs who are making $130k who have worked there for 4 years and they don't want to give them a raise to $200k.


I know a guy that works at a very well-known tech company and has been a software engineer for over 15 years for them and is only being paid $120K.

He says "They treat me well", and I'm like, no they fucking don't. They don't value your work anywhere close to what it should be. I told him that he could easily triple his TC by going almost literally anywhere else.

I used to work for said company. I left because the salary was way below market and literally doubled my salary from $100K to $200K at my new digs. I made it no secret to my old manager that money was the #1 reason why I was leaving (#2 being that the team I was working on was basically falling apart due to internal politics), and he acknowledged that salaries are significantly below market and that HR is promising updates to salary bands to bring them up to market within the next couple months. Spoiler alert: It's been 1 1/2 years since I left, and the couple people I talk to from there say nothing has changed.


Just remember that these employers underpaying their staff are going to be the first ones on HN saying how unions are not needed because pay is already high in the tech world.


This is probably true but also bad practice imo. It instantly signals that employers value leverage rather than employees.


Wouldn’t the concept of anchoring say the opposite though?

I’ve always wondered that.

My guess is if you say too high of a number they don’t take you seriously so anchoring can’t work?


posting a number can help confident people but hurts others

example, developer makes 100k, has imposter syndrome, sees a great job that has an internal range of 150k-200k. if the dev knew the range they’d think no way they would qualify for THAT much money. the company would happily pay at bottom range for them, but instead they don’t even see the developer.

ranges select for confident people.


I'm sorry but... what kind of victim blaming nonsense is this? Seeing a salary range intimidates people?!

That's 100% worth the cost, friend. Knowing what you're applying for/to is absolutely critical information, and having it before applying is a substantial amount of leverage in any negotiation.

That's like saying people shouldn't post where a job is because some people might not live there, or not to post C++ jobs because not everyone knows C++...


i’ve had nearly 10+ jobs and i never knew the range

also on higher levels comp comes from equity base pay of $100k is immaterial if RSU/equity is $500k

i do believe it hurts the people in weaker positions vs helping

cause high comp individuals know how to play the game anyways


There's just so much here in your small comment (you've burned through "nearly 10+ jobs" and you're giving advice to people?!) I can't really address this but to say you're completely wrong that it hurts people to know what they'd get paid for a job, and I think that's pretty obviously the case, as do most folks, including the good people of New York who passed a law requiring it.


If you care about people in weaker positions so much, perhaps develop a web plugin for them which will hide the compensation amount on the job pages?


Read another way, hiding salary range let's companies take advantage of low confidence applicants by exploiting their labor at below market rates.

Insecurity in pay only arises through hiding the true value of labor.


OK. Let's take it as read that ranges discourage the uncertain and nervous. How should companies go about posting ads that treats those people compassionately and puts them on an event footing with confident people? Preferably while not denying people who would like to see it useful information?


my point was that ranges can hurt

maybe a solution is to have a website that had to post a range but also require them to post it on another site where ranges are not allowed

so those that want to see jobs and not be distracted by $ can do so


Write a greasemonkey script. Or pay someone to do it for you. Reducing the amount of information available in a job posting is easily solvable client-side, especially since I disagree with you about the overall negative effect.


I believe Rutter was one of the examples, tho I did not see them today - maybe an older post, but the UI of that page is super familiar.

Glad to see they updated - but anything less than $220k is hard to swallow for non-remote in NYC.


NY is not the only state that requires jobs postings to include salary ranges.


NY state does not require job postings to include salary ranges, only New York City (and technically not for all job postings).


There are some comments in here that verge on assuming bad faith on the part of the companies involved, so I think it's worth pointing out that this is a new law which has been in effect for just over a month. It's been on the way for a while, so it's not “sudden”, but it’s still a new thing that people are figuring out and it’s easier to forget about if you’re in the habit of re-using old listings. (Not about OP, whose reminder is helpful and in good faith!)


>There are some comments in here that verge on assuming bad faith on the part of the companies involved

Not disclosing pay is illegal in three states in the US, and has the practical effect of reducing the number of applicants to the advertised job by 14%, so it's self-harming for the employer anyway. Bonus: a lot of job boards will just plug an "estimated salary" in for you to max their CTR and revenue on syndication.

> people are figuring out and it’s easier to forget about if you’re in the habit of re-using old listings.

Some companies don't hire very often, so yes. But for startups and venture funded, high growth companies to be unaware after two years is not cool. We need to do better... and you can see from the people posting here, some of them would rather report employers to the AG than get a job at that company. I'm not sure how productive that is, but I do think it shows why a law was required to get a minimal level of disclosure.


> It has the effect of reducing the number of applicants by 14% (if you believe the study) only if at market rate or higher.

Most startups are paying the lower end of market rate to below market rate salaries and compensating more with equity, so it's not necessarily irrational on the part of the startups.

> But for startups and venture funded, high growth companies to be unaware after two years is not cool

There are a million more important things to worry about at most startups than being in regulatory compliance with every silly law. I would venture to guess that the more a startup is in regulatory compliance with every little thing the less likely it is to succeed.


> There are a million more important things to worry about at most startups than being in regulatory compliance with every silly law.

Being a scofflaw does not increase your company's valuation.


Are the companies indeed inflicting self harm? They might get less applications that way, but posting salary ranges for new employees has other downsides - e.g. it might tilt existing employees.

Another downside is that it's easy to scrap and collect this data and companies might not like candidates or employees easily accessing historical data.

Sharing salary range basically reduces the knowledge advantage of a company in many ways.

It's surely great for candidates and existing employees.


reduces the knowledge advantage of a company

Defaulting to an adversarial relationship with its own staff is not the sign of a good company.


>and existing employees.

Oh wow, true. Now I'll know exactly when to negotiate a raise or leave.


> but posting salary ranges for new employees has other downsides - e.g. it might tilt existing employees.

Fucking good.

It's absolutely scummy to secretly pay new hires more than your experienced existing employees.

It's also extremely short-sighted. You'd rather deal with attrition costs of losing a trained, experienced employee and having to find new candidates and train someone new, than to just give your current employees the pay raise they obviously deserve?

> Sharing salary range basically reduces the knowledge advantage of a company in many ways.

That's the fucking point.


> You'd rather deal with attrition costs of losing a trained, experienced employee and having to find new candidates and train someone new, than to just give your current employees the pay raise they obviously deserve?

The job market is a market, meaning it's a game between buyers and sellers. "Deserve" does not exist there. The companies are obviously counting on the fact that majority of people will prefer to stay put instead of risk jumping ship for a salary increase - which is in fact what happens in practice.


> Are the companies indeed inflicting self harm?

They are spending 14% more on recruitment advertising than they would have to if they just put a range in the salary box. So, yes, financial self harm. 14% is substantial for many companies.

> ther downsides - e.g. it might tilt existing employees.

People have access to wage data and job boards in their pocket. If they answer that unknown caller, it's as likely to be a recruiter as a car warranty hustle. It's amazing how many business leaders think that their people are not going to look.


> They are spending 14% more on recruitment advertising

Oh boy, huge assumptions there, so bad that I would associate that thinking with HR recruiters. What matters is what selects/filters for desirable employees. Getting 14% more applicants is a terrible metric to be measuring - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law which is obvious since one can increase applications by advertising in irrelevant places to get more irrelevant applicants.

Alternatively 14% more could be extremely important, if a lack of salary indication filtered for bad candidates, and salary indication brought in good candidates.

> A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later. [your top level comment].

That’s an interesting metric, since anecdotally the best candidates get snapped up extremely quickly.

It is obviously very difficult to find good factual correlations: a lack of good data just produces opinions.


> Oh boy, huge assumptions there, so bad that I would associate that thinking with HR recruiters.

HR and recruiting is not legendary for financial acumen, but they do spend in aggregate, billions on advertising, and they do in many cases have very good analyitcs on that spend.

> Alternatively 14% more could be extremely important, if a lack of salary indication filtered for bad candidates, and salary indication brought in good candidates.

We've not seen a change in quality of candidate in either direction. It does reduce the cost per applicant significantly.


>They are spending 14% more on recruitment advertising than they would have to if they just put a range in the salary box.

Mind you I prefer when companies post salaries, but 14% greater/fewer applicants does not directly equate to 14% greater/lesser spend on listings. A company only needs one qualified applicant. More applicants means you might find better candidates faster/more easily, but by itself listing salaries isn't necessarily going to save the company money.


> reducing the number of applicants to the advertised job by 14%

does not mean

> spending 14% more on recruitment advertising

if a company gets 86 applicants instead of 100, that's less screening work which means less $ spent for the hire.


> if a company gets 86 applicants instead of 100, that's less screening work which means less $ spent for the hire.

Using this logic, then just hire the first person who applies and you will minimize all cost. Screening is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of making a bad hire, and the quality of the final candidates requires you have enough candidates to make a good selection from.


This has been law in Colorado for 2 years and applies to anyone offering jobs to any Colorado resident including remote jobs.

The law passed in 2019 and went into effect Jan 1, 2021.


I was just in a Walgreens near Boulder a few days ago and noticed that they were advertising for pharmacy assistants and didn't post their salary range, and also didn't list it even after I went to sign up online for the job. So I have to guess a lot of employers are disregarding the law. I was also disappointed when I found out there wasn't a particularly easy way to report the violation to the state. It could just be a webform that I fill out that takes 2 minutes, but there was so much overhead that I decided I didn't care enough to complete it.


If I search for job listings for Boulder, CO or Colorado, US on Walgreens' website, I get zero results.

It did pop up with New York City job listings, like this one:

https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/job/new-york/duane-reade-shift...

Which do not list the pay range, but have tiny text at the bottom that says

>To see the salary range for this position please click here: Pay Transparency Duane Reade Shift Leader .

https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/paydrsfl

And then if you search for similar positions, you get:

https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/paypht

https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/payhsrph


Check the site "walgreens.jobs", the listings are still there.

Here's a photo I took of the posting: https://i.imgur.com/jSl1Rjk.png


Oh, something must be broken with their search, or my Safari content blocker is blocking something which is breaking the search.

I found the a job listing in boulder here, which has the same pay range link as above:

https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/job/boulder/pharmacy-technicia...

But yes, per CO law, the job posting you took a picture of should also state the same pay range and benefit info (page 4).

https://cdle.colorado.gov/sites/cdle/files/7%20CCR%201103-13...


I actually think they fixed the online version since the last time I checked - when I visited it 3 weeks ago, I remember the site staying on the "walgreens.jobs" domain for the entire visit - now it redirects to jobs.walgreens.com. I wonder if they were using an old poster from before the law came into effect, and maybe even the listings/website were old before the migration to jobs.walgreens.com - now they do include a link to the pay information, but I love how they make you copy and paste a URL instead of just directly including the info, or even making it a hyperlink.


Has Colorado actually enforced the law?

The major difference with the NY law is that NY is actually expected to enforce it. That being said, the law is deliberately expected to be leniently enforced, starting with warnings, and only after the warning has been issued will fines be enforced.

Also, another big difference is that other major states (CA & WA I believe) are expected to enact similar laws in 2023, so most US companies are pretty much switching over to displaying salary ranges by default nationally.


CA has passed their law and it takes effect on January 1


CO has enforced the law.


Different companies clearly have different legal teams giving differing advice. I found this one fascinating:

“If you are a Colorado or New York City resident and this role is a remote role, you can receive additional information about the compensation and benefits for this role, which we will provide upon request. Requests can be submitted here.“

link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOlYgPtpG56uqO0O9j...

When I submitted my information I did not hear back, which does feel like a blatant violation of the law(s)


Very blatant violation. They are just hoping they do not get nailed, and if they do, the fines are cheap enough to still make it worth hiding the pay range.

See page 4, it is spelled out pretty clearly that the posting itself needs to advertise the range.

https://cdle.colorado.gov/sites/cdle/files/7%20CCR%201103-13...


It amounts to plausible deniability. "We do just enough so you are less likely to sue us."


Do they blame this one on the lowest level recruiting employee who “must have forgotten to do their job”? That’s as plausible as what SBF’s defense will be.


I actually heard back from them today! Crazy how long it took them


And yet many job postings, even those that are only in Colorado, still don't have the salary on the job posting.


My point is that it’s not a new law. It’s new for New York but other states have required it for a long time.


Only one jurisdiction other than NYC (not New York State) requires it, which is CO, and only as of Jan 1, 2021. NYC started Nov 1, 2022. CA and WA start Jan 1, 2023.

NY state is waiting on governor’s signature, but seeing as how it has been months and she has not signed it, I assume she will not.


It would be interesting to see if remote jobs were posted with a qualifier that they weren't available to potential employees living in those states. I just always wonder about inverse effects for this type of thing.


There were or are remote job listings that excluded people living in Colorado. Any any new job listing could choose to exclude residents of NYC/CO/WA/CA.

Pretty good signal of a less desirable employer though.


Do you make the same argument for new speed limit signs? Abortion restrictions? Minimum wage requirements?


I think it's worth pointing out that this is a new law which has been in effect for just over a month

I hope you don't mind if I don't weep for the billion dollar VC's that encourage others to "move fast," but are unable to respond to changes in the law.

If only they had enough money to hire a lawyer!

This law didn't suddenly materialize overnight last month. No laws do. It was in the works for months, perhaps longer.

All companies are responsible for keeping tabs on legislation that may affect them. From the corner doughnut shop to billion-dollar startup incubators.

That Ycombinator missed this says something is wrong behind the curtain.


Good thing that in law "ignorantia juris non excusat"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat


this is a new law which has been in effect for just over a month

So what? The idea of transparency on salaries is not a new one. Why would I want to do business with a company that won't even tell me how much they're offering for a job when asked? That just wastes people's time.

I don't care for this legalistic and disingenuous approach to business, it's an indicator that management is not going to be transparent with people who work there and is relying on information asymmetries rather than actually trying to build a team. Anyone acting like they don't know that potential hires have a strong interest in knowing what a job potentially pays is BSing you.


How much of a heads up did people get?


Contact the company, and tell them they need to publish their salary range. Or else you'll report them to the NYC Attorney General (or whoever is in charge of this thing). Maybe they're ignorant. Or they're hoping noone calls them out on this. Either way, make sure they know the consequences if they don't publish it


This will certainly move you to the top of the list for hiring consideration. /s


Yes, because everyone is absolutely jumping in their boots to work at a company where HR ignores the law, either through ignorance or malice the same.


Good way to filter out candidates that are either ignorant of the requirements and/or do not "buck" the system. Realistically, it's either a company that doesn't think this will be enforced, doesn't think the punishment would outweigh the benefits, or circumvents the requirements legally such as posting a single announcement in their lobby (public place) that does list the salary range.


There are polite ways of accomplishing that.


The user in question sells alt data. If they’re remotely competent at doing so, they have zero need to work at a startup much less a YC-funded one.


What's alt data? I've never heard that term before.


"What Is Alternative Data and Why Is It Changing Finance?"

https://builtin.com/fintech/alternative-data


TL;DR: Info gleaned from just about any source other than company statements and market data, used to guide investment choices. This includes stuff like satellite imagery, which has been used for a long time for these sorts of purposes, but also e.g. social media trends. I guess the news is that there's more of it happening now, because the practice itself isn't new.


Fascinating.


Some tangible examples are: credit card transaction data, individual geolocation or foot-traffic data from mobile phone sdks or carriers themselves, receipts scraped/exfiltrated from email inboxes, individual browsing history, or highly targeted web scraped data.

All "anonymized" of course.


That's not the point. YC lends credibility to these companies by funding them, so allowing them to post illegal job ads on a platform controlled by YC strongly implies that YC has no problem with that practice.

This is the appropriate venue to talk about it and make YC aware of it.


It's not YC's job to monitor global regulatory compliance for every company they fund.


We're not talking global compliance here though, this is a US-based fund, these are US-based startups, and the regulations involved are by some US states. One would hope national regulatory compliance does fall at least partially under the things they monitor.

I agree it's unrealistic to expect them to monitor compliance across the globe, of course.


But when YC posts these ads on their HN front page..?


It's actually enforced by the NYC Commission on Human Rights


YC’s HN altered the submission in a way that erases the previously stated fact that this behavior is a violation of NYC law, which leaves the discussion unresponsive to the question and also risks the appearance of trying to hide the illegal behavior.

There were probably other reasons behind the change but to preserve the meaning of the post something about this being a possible/likely violation of nyc law should IMO be added back to the post.


I explained the title change here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33974170. I think you make a good point though, so I've edited it again.

For those curious, the originally submitted title was "Ask HN: Why are YC companies breaking hiring laws?" and the first edit was "Ask HN: Why are YC companies hiring in NYC not posting their salary range? I've just edited it a second time, to "Ask HN: Why are YC companies in NYC posting their salary range, as law requires?". I don't think that's a very good HN title, as it makes a general claim about "YC companies in NYC" which is almost certainly both untrue and unfair. But for reasons I explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33974170, I suppose it's ok as a tradeoff.

Edit: whoops that second edit dropped the 'not', which was obviously critical. I've replaced it with Ask HN: Why are YC companies in NYC not posting salary range, as law requires?.

Edit 2: I've changed it again in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976153. It's now "Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?"


> "Ask HN: Why are YC companies in NYC posting their salary range, as law requires?"

Is that the right polarity? I think the question was/should be why "aren't" they posting it. Right? Or do I totally misunderstand?


Yikes, that was a typo. Sorry! Now I have to figure out how to squeeze 'not' in there without going over 80 chars.

Edit: ok, fixed now.


> without going over 80 chars

The tyranny of the horse's ass, or rather the 60's terminal, strikes again.

(reference: the width of train tracks are rumored to be based on the width of a horse's ass, from ye olden days.)


It goes back well past the 60's terminal, all the way to the size dollar bills had had, when punched cards were invented.


I never meant to imply all NYC companies are doing this FYI.


Thanks, I appreciate the clarification.

I've edited it again with that in mind - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976352.


Conflict-of-interest evident in the HN re-title-fication of this post.

Recall that making something less salacious when you are the subject is quite different from toning down clickbait headlines when you're wearing your neutral-editorial hat.

Original title was 'Why are some YC companies breaking the law?' And frankly, that's a great question.

Admittedly not-so-great is the absence of any specific example on the OP, but that's another matter.

The post is about law-abidingness and to change that to protect YC on a chat board run by YC is sketch, YC.


I changed the title as part of moderating this thread less than we normally would. We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or YC startups are part of the story—this has been established practice since the beginning: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

The way we'd normally moderate a thread like this is by downweighting it as a generic riler-upper (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Posts like the OP are extremely common, because the internet is perpetually noticing something seemingly outrageous, jumping to the most extreme interpretation, exclaiming angrily, and then egging itself on. That's how the medium works. If we didn't downweight such posts, the front page would be be nothing but sensational/indignant material; there'd be no room for anything else. This is a no-brainer as a moderation call, and this practice has also been established on HN since the beginning. However, because the thread mentions YC startups, I haven't touched it or done what we normally would.

Editing sensational/indignant titles to be more neutral and reflect the substance of a story (not that there's really a story here) is another well-established moderation practice on HN, again for what ought to be obvious reasons: if we didn't do it, then the front page would consist of nothing but that. So in this case I limited myself to the minimum viable title edit, while letting the post continue to burn at a much higher rank on the front page than it would ever normally get away with.

For me the real conflict or tradeoff here is: how do we balance the need to not suppress criticisms (even when they are unfair or untrue—because the good will of the community is more important, in fact it's the only asset HN really has), with the need to preserve HN for its intended purpose. The ecosystem is fragile and takes a lot of tending to, and one of the most important forms of tending—which only moderators can really provide—is to not allow garden-variety internet indignation to drown out the quieter, more interesting material that HN is supposed to be for. It should be clear why the rule is "we moderate less when YC is the story", rather than "we moderate not at all"—the latter would be a loophole you could drive a convoy of trucks through.

Therefore, when I asked myself what was the minimum reasonable thing to do, editing the sensational or (to use your word) salacious title to accurate reflect what (little) substance the post actually included, while not downweighting the submission the way we usually would, seemed to me the right tradeoff. This post doesn't deserve the hours on the front page that it's getting, but that's the local price we pay in favor of a global optimization.

Edit: I changed the title again after posting this, in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973106, which made a fair point.


Bro, the post effected positive change (several updated job posts before regulatory bodies were involved), and could have been done with a lot less tact. For example, I could have screenshotted or even just mentioned offenders.

Maybe the tone wasn't perfect - but isn't it YOUR job to pay attention to what gets posted here? Were you not aware of the labor laws in these states? It isn't something that happened just a couple of times.

Get off your high horse, buddy. HN has gone down hill in the last 10yrs and part of that is because of these stupid policies and actions.

There's no transparency into what you do. Your words are just words.


Hey, I'm sorry. I acknowledge the positive effects of your post, your good intentions, and the fact that you could have been a lot less tactful.

I was writing from a place of general irritation and even defensiveness. I wasn't thinking about your point of view or how you would feel reading my general putdowns of this type of post. If I were in your position, I'd be pissed off too.

Even after doing this for a long time, I still find myself making unhelpful assumptions. All I can tell you is that I'll continue to work on it.


Sorry for going off. Inappropriate on my part.


Did you consider mailing Dan about this issue before making it an 'Ask HN' post?


This whole thing is pretty silly, right? The penalties for noncompliance with NYC's law apply to the listing company, not to the board they posted on. If you really think YC companies are deliberately skirting the law, report them to NYC.

NYC does a one-time 90-day notice-and-cure, so you can "effect positive change" with listing YC companies without subjecting them to fines, if that's really what you're worried about.

I don't see what this has to do with HN, at all.


Exactly, and - assuming a mistake rather than maliciousness should have been the first take. There are 100's if not thousands of rules and regulations companies need to conform to and you should normally at a minimum give them a chance to fix this rather than to right away start yelling about them 'breaking the law', because no CEO that I'm aware of does so willingly (assuming they intend to stay in business and take their responsibilities somewhat seriously). This seems more like an exercise in grandstanding than actual concern.


It's also just so weird to suggest that HN should be policing this. They're fixated on NYC's law, but NYC is more lenient, at least statutorily, than Colorado, which has had this rule for over a year. But NYC and Colorado have different disclosure requirements, as will California and Washington. That's not just down to who needs to disclose (if you have fewer than 5 NYC employees, for instance, you're apparently not obligated to report) but also what you have to disclose.

It's not reasonable to suggest that HN should also run an HR practice. Again: totally fair to be irritated at a YC company who lists a noncompliant job. Go report them!


I would be highly surprised if in any given startup in the first 24 months they were not at least in breach of several laws, especially in the HR domain. Usually this gets fixed during the first fundraising (during legal DD and for a regulated industry compliance review) but your average 3 people in a room start-up trying to get a product out the door will inevitably make mistakes like these - and worse. The GDPR is an easy one to mess up on, local employment law, employment contracts, especially when hiring people remote can be super tricky and if you are in a regulated industry my advice would be to hire a part time compliance officer (and probably an HR professional as well) as soon as you can afford it, it will save a whole raft of problems later on.

Regulators are usually more than willing to work with such young companies to get them to become compliant, rather than to throw the book at them at the first opportunity.

Given the state of the companies advertising on YC my assumption would be that they are too busy to get to either an MVP or to break even to be acutely aware of all of these compliance issues. One thing YC does is to help the companies with legal support, they probably could give some assistance with making sure that public job ads are compliant either by serving as a clearing house or to offer a set of written guidelines to ensure basic compliance, thus minimizing the risk of accidentally running afoul of the law.


I mean, no, local regulators are not generally friendly to startups (I've experienced drama both in SFBA and in Chicagoland) --- but nobody is really being fined for these salary disclosure laws. :)

Companies should list their salary ranges! Like, regardless of the law!


> Companies should list their salary ranges! Like, regardless of the law!

Yes, definitely. It's to everybody's advantage. The assumption should be that if a company does not list its salary range and they're young that they don't know better and if they're older that you are about to get screwed.


Well, it is nicer to post here than to tell the authorities, certainly.


Is it? I'm not so sure.


I didn't pick anyone out or shame. Seems like the post brought positive change.


No, I didn't put a massive amount of thought into the post, I admit. But it is a problem with the HN board here (content is posted here) so I didn't think it was inappropriate to highlight it here.

I also don't really expect Dan to moderate this. Seems like it isn't really his job, unless he made the decision to allow that content here to start.


I commend dang for listening to what multiple people were advising and backing out of a misleading edit.

Thank you, I appreciate how difficult your job is. (And how difficult people like myself sometimes seem to make it.)


Still misleading. It now implies it is only a NYC issue and that all NYC companies are at fault.


Ok, I've tried once more—this time taking out NYC and taking out the implication that all YC companies are at fault. Is this better?


Yes, but one last quibble.

Technically, in the phrase "YC startups are breaking the law", there is no clear implication that it is all YC startups.

The phrase simply does not speak on the point of quantity, and is pretty decent 'headline English', which traditionally does away with 'some', 'the', etc, trading specificity for celerity.

However, with the phrasing 'Some YC startups are breaking the law", there is actually additional information being added. Intentionally or not, dang is injecting into the discourse a self-protective disclaimer.

If you're really curious, one can probably work out a symbolic representation of the truth claim being made in any higher-order logic that can express Vagueness (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/) and demonstrate how the truth functions differ, but frankly I'm not a grad student anymore, and I'm less excited to do free symbolic logic problems ;D


Now we've reached a deadlock, since as far as I can tell, your interpretation and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976153 are incompatible.


Oh, one more thing.

Popping the devtools on my brain, I think the reason this issue jumped out at me in the first place is that YC's moral ground has shifted lately, mostly because of its exposure to blockchain bets, many of which turned out to be, how to put this politely, more valuable than worthy.

In this new climate, it's impossible for me not to pay close attention to how organizations shield themselves from reputational risk.

It might be advisable to HN to come up with some self-regulatory editorial policies and guidelines to prevent unintentional conflicts-of-interest.

For example, if it turned out that HN was being used to systematically privilege coverage of its friends, allies, and clients, that would have reputational impact on the publication going forward.

I don't think that's what's intentionally going on here, but I also feel we've seen just how fraught the act of edition actually is.


It's fraught, but from my perspective it's no more fraught than it used to be. The very first thing pg told me about moderating HN (before I even had time to grab a chair) was not to suppress anti-YC stories. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... has years worth of these cases, and there have been masses of others. I think the editorial policy is pretty clear (I've outlined it in this thread, and many other comments reachable through that HN Search link); it's also been stable for a long time.


Well, they let you down here, didn't they?

Rephrasing: HN needs better self-regulation, because the weather has changed, and it's not a good look when you're standing halfway between several unhinged billionaires.

This is a friendly observation. Please be well and do the best you can.


> Well, they let you down here, didn't they?

Sorry, what are you referring to? I'm not aware of being let down by anyone.


You would say pg is unhinged? Certainly detached but idk about unhinged.


Oh, not pg. I was thinking more about the industry's duelling distractions, SBF and EM


That was a lot of words.

The “minimum” reasonable thing to do would have been to leave the thread alone if it is in fact your policy to moderate YC threads less than usual.

Can you point to some non-YC posts that you have explicitly removed references to breaking the law from?

It is, in fact, breaking the law to list NYC jobs without providing salary range in the same way that it is breaking the law to jaywalk or piss on the subway. Do you find references to those laws to be salacious and sensational?

It was a mundane observation that these companies were breaking the law in the same way that it is a mundane observation that editing a title to obscure that gives the impression that it was not motivated by some sort of stoic adherence to some objective ideal.

Was “TikTok is an illegal fork of OBS” a sensational, salacious title?


I admit it was a lot of words, but I believe that lot of words already answered most of your points. As for the rest...I generally haven't found it to be a good use of time to answer that sort of cross-examination. The bulk of the community seems quite happy when we explain our thinking in good faith and don't do anything too extreme, but the cross-examiner is usually impossible to satisfy. I'm not talking about you here! but in my past experience, patiently answering a cross-examination usually only produces a longer cross-examination. I'd rather spend those resources making HN better for the rest of the community.

But you did get me curious to see if I could find a past example of this kind of title edit. I did find one from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30680267. We changed "Google Fi Illegally Bricked My iPhone 11 Pro Max" to "Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)" That's a typical example of HN moderation because we not only took out the sensational/disputable word, we also added the year—which besides being a normal edit, has the side effect of damping the riler-upper aspect. (The internet only likes to get angry about fresh things.)

Re the Tiktok bit, you seem to be asking about this post: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 - Dec 2021. I couldn't find any record of us moderating that post, so my first thought was that perhaps we just didn't see it. But I commented several times in the thread, so that can't be it either. Given that https://twitter.com/Naaackers/status/1471494415306788870 was exactly the sort of riler-upper that we routinely downweight, and in this case neglected to, my guess is that I was too busy in the comments and forgot to look at the article.

In a case like that, it would be normal to add a question mark as a way of making the title more neutral. We did that, for example, here: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33343681 - Oct 2022 (246 comments)

Now I have added another lot of words. I hope some of this is useful!


Probably because HN is not a law enforcement agency for New York City. The law has some exceptions, perhaps those apply. Why not contact the company and politely ask for the salary range?


I agree with the sentiment but maybe you can see this post as them doing that very thing but aimed at YC. While I agree normal HN posts don’t need to be policed, the ads for hiring at YC companies aren’t normal posts.


Sure. But if someone wants YC to enforce posting salary ranges in job posts they might want to take that up privately with YC management rather than starting with public criticism. In other contexts people usually advocate "praise publicly, criticize privately." If the OP thinks YC job posts break the law or fall short of ethical rules then I suggest asking YC about it rather than accusing YC companies of "breaking hiring laws" on a public forum.


OP didn't accuse. OP pointed out. NY evidently requires pay ranges. This job posting did not include the required pay range.

There are also zero posts disparaging the company, YC, or HN. Any particular range you're upset about this?


The original post title: "Why are YC companies breaking hiring laws?"

I read that as an accusation. OP did not name any specific companies supposedly breaking hiring laws. New York City started requiring salary ranges in job postings for most companies (not all) just a few weeks ago. I would interpret a few job postings that don't include salaries as oversights or perhaps companies exempt from the law (which has a few exceptions).

If someone posted "Why is HN allowing shanelbellone to break the law?" would you read that as an accusation?


Why are you so heavily invested in this accusation? HN is completely capable of responding to any accusations properly.


I have invested exactly as much in this thread as you and everyone else have.

I don't have any investment in the topic. I don't care if companies post salaries in their job postings. I just pointed out that the OP made a couple of accusations, including the implication that YC was allowing their companies to break the law in HN job postings. OP did not provide any examples.

> HN is completely capable of responding to any accusations properly.

Exactly, that was the point I made above. If OP thinks HN is complicit in something illegal, take it up with them. I didn't post unsourced accusations on HN. If I had an actual concern about YC allowing (OP's word) their companies to break the law I would contact YC about it privately.

If someone posts in a public forum that some (unnamed) companies have broken the law (without any supporting facts), and that YC maybe allowed that because of their financial interest, making them complicit, I think that person should expect pushback. Either back up the claim or back off.

My personal reasons for commenting make no difference. Questioning my motives or "investment" amount to ad hominem, and don't address the issues raised by the OP or subsequent comments.


I don't understand how you can say this: "without any supporting facts"

Your comments sound angry, defensive, and accusatory.


What facts did the OP provide to support the claim that YC was allowing YC startups to post job ads without salary ranges, allegedly in violation of NYC law? Go back to the original post and point out the supporting facts. That's how I can say it.

I have no stake in this. I pointed out that OP leveled an accusation against YC and some "YC startups" claiming that their job postings did not include salary ranges "when law requires it." With not a single referenced job posting or example that just stands as an unfounded accusation.

Again, no need to try to infer my motives or emotional state. Either the OP made an unsupported accusation or they did not. Easy enough to determine that from the post without projecting or speculating about my emotional state.


> Probably because HN is not a law enforcement agency for New York City.

True, but irrelevant, as that's not the only reason to do it. YC has a brand whose value they surely wish to maintain. Presumably that gives them an interest in not directly aiding companies in breaking the law.


Ethical behavior, to me, includes considering more than one reason someone or some company does something I don't like. Possibly these companies posting on HN deliberately intended to break the law. Equally possibly (more likely, in my opinion) those companies don't know about the law, or haven't had time to comply since the law went into effect just a few weeks ago. Any number of explanations present themselves, and only a few come down to "deliberately breaking the law" or doing anything unethical or shady.

So I don't think a reasonable person should quickly (and publicly) jump from "this job posting apparently for NYC doesn't include salaries" to "the company broke hiring laws" and "HN directly aids companies breaking the law." Try a more generous interpretation on.


I don't believe I said anything about intent. Indeed, my comment is rooted in the assumption that YC wants to do the right thing here. Did you mean to reply to somebody else?

Even assuming the best of intent -- in fact, especially when we assume that -- YC's role as a guide to often-novice entrepreneurs means they should be helping out here. Both by educating them on changing hiring laws and by sending back inadequate job postings for reworking.

Regarding your last paragraph, I'll also note that whether "the company broke hiring laws" is a purely factual question, as is whether or not HN publishes job ads that break the law. A generous interpretation involves why and how they did it, but can't include denying the facts.


Since the OP didn't quote or link to any of the supposedly offending job posts we can't judge the "purely factual question." That would require seeing the job posting in question and then reading the text of the NYC law. We would have to determine if the NYC law applied to every specific case. If OP implies that job postings from YC companies "break hiring laws" then the OP should support that with some facts.

The NYC Commission on Human Rights has a complaint process documented at NYC.gov/HumanRights. If someone has evidence of an actual violation perhaps start there rather than posting unsubstantiated accusations and implying illegal behavior on the part of un-named employers and YC.


Again, are you sure you're replying to the right person? The one saying this happened is not me. I'm replying to a specific point about the extent to which YC would want to prevent this from happening.

I'll also note that the person who did post about this perhaps left the company names out because they were being considerate, not wanting to invite trouble for people who could be entirely well meaning when they are just examples of a broader problem. So as long as you're arguing for assuming good intent, maybe you could try that yourself?


I did think you wrote the original post. My mistake, I have corrected my comment.

Whether YC would want to prevent illegal or unethical behavior is a question I can't answer. I would hope so. But I don't think it's reasonable to put the burden of enforcing various employment posting laws on YC/HN, especially when the laws are new and have jurisdiction questions and exceptions. My reading of the NYC law tells me job boards are not subject to any enforcement -- only the companies posting the job ads have to comply.

I don't object to a discussion about what responsibility YC and HN have in regards to allowing job posts that don't include salary ranges. Personally I would ignore job posts that don't voluntarily include that. I objected to the OP characterizing the job posts from YC companies as "breaking hiring laws." Whether the law was broken or not would require more facts than the OP gave. Maybe the OP didn't name the companies that supposedly "broke hiring laws" out of consideration, but in the original post it seems clear OP intended to call them out in comments but couldn't comment on the posts, not that the OP decided to take the considerate path of not naming them.


> I don't object to a discussion about what responsibility YC and HN have

How very generous of you to allow us to discuss things.


Don't go all Musk on me. Me objecting to a topic does not "allow" or censor anyone else. I object to your snide comment but would not disallow it.


I'm not sure why you want me to politely ask a company to stop breaking the law?


Because not every violation has bad intentions, so why not be polite?

And folks at startups are usually wearing multiple hats. They might not have a VP of Recruiting/HR/Legal on board that knows all applicable federal/state/city laws. It might be a SWE posting these jobs.


They might not have four employees yet. They might not have any employees in NYC yet. Either of those conditions would exempt them from the NYC law.

I wouldn't jump to assuming deliberate illegal behavior. The NYC law went into effect last month, and waives the penalty for first offenses to give companies time to comply. If I saw a NYC-based job posting with no salary I would give the benefit of the doubt at least.


why does not having any nyc employees yet exempt them if they are hiring nyc-based people?


The official explanation* of the law reads:

> All employers that have four or more employees or one or more domestic workers are covered by the NYCHRL, including this new provision of the law. As with other provisions of the NYCHRL, owners and individual employers count towards the four employees. The four employees do not need to work in the same location, and they do not need to all work in New York City. As long as one of the employees works in New York City, the workplace is covered.

I don't have a law degree, but I read that as the law only applies if the company currently has at least four employees, one of which "works in New York City." If a company intends to hire someone in NYC but has no employees there yet the law wouldn't apply to them yet, probably because NYC wouldn't have jurisdiction without a nexus in the city.

* https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...


In my experience the police aren't polite when people are breaking laws, so I don't see why I should hold companies to a lower standard than my fellow citizens.


That wouldn't count as polite. I suggested asking the company for the salary range. If they decline to answer then you make your own decision about that.


Maybe HN could require salary range in order to be promoted here (regardless of location or laws)?


You mean do the ethical thing, not just the legal thing?


> You mean do the ethical thing, not just the legal thing?

Can you clarify what you mean by "ethical" in this case? It's not obvious to me which ethic / whose interests deserve priority in a case like this.


The more-powerful and better-informed entity deliberately leveraging those imbalances to extract more value from the weaker entity is unethical. Might be normal, might be expected, might be "just business", but it's unethical.

It's also contrary to the ideals of a free market, if that matters to anyone.

I'll admit that it's ethical if one's ethical framework is based on Pirates of the Caribbean. "Take what you can, give nothing back." Which probably is pretty common, especially among people who succeed at business.


> more-powerful and better-informed entity

With many of these roles, it’s unclear who has the advantage: the seed-stage start-up or the key employee.


I think the one counting YC folks as advisors probably have the information advantage more often than not, unless they're astonishingly incompetent.


Respectfully, if someone can't comply with the laws they're subject to (or more accurately bother to look up the laws they need to comply with), they shouldn't be trying to run a business.

It's literally their job as a business owner, and millions of people successfully do this every year.


I can guarantee that every single business fails to comply with many laws. No one can know every law that might apply to them. A startup in California advertising a remote job that they hire a New Yorker for now has to comply with NYC laws. At best you can try to keep up with, understand, and comply with the most important and well-known laws. But you don't find out your toilets aren't ADA compliant or your storage shed breaks the fire and zoning rules until someone catches you. It's simply not practical to "look up the laws they need to comply with."


> It's simply not practical to "look up the laws they need to comply with."

If that's the case where you're incorporated and operating, specialists in what the law says and how it applies exists. Use some of that VC money to use them.

That said, your examples are pretty terrible. ADA rules for buildings are incredibly clear, and a halfway decent contractor will know them. Ditto fire rules. Seriously, a business owner with a shed that hurts or kills somebody for not being compliant with fire codes deserves their day in court.

Oh, and the usual "Ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law" applies here too.


>Probably because HN is not a law enforcement agency for New York City.

Okay? But this law exists in other places too.

>Why not contact the company and politely ask for the salary range?

Because its not their responsibility to make sure some random corp is following the law? They're just getting burned by the effect.


Then not giving them a special soapbox and making them post like regular users would be the appropriate response, right?


Not sure how someone gets burned by not seeing the salary range. That would come up in the first five minutes of talks with the potential employer.

HN does not enforce NYC laws. Nor does it enforce Colorado laws, or any laws regarding jobs including salary ranges. Whether YC/HN have an ethical responsibility or not comes down to one's ethical position. Laws do not necessarily equal ethics.

Personally I would ignore job postings that leave out crucial information, including salary ranges. If we all did that (i.e. behaved according to our professed ethics) companies would post salary ranges just to get applicants. Compelling companies to post salary ranges by law may have some underlying logic I agree with, I don't know for sure. Compelling HN or any other public forum to enforce those laws (which vary and change by jurisdiction, with numerous exceptions) seems a stretch to me -- I would rather see the job posts and decide which to ignore and which to respond to rather than have HN try to enforce the patchwork of local laws by hiding postings. Once you get into the moderation business you have to invest a lot of effort in that and still you will piss off a lot of people.


HN is also not a hiring outfit, but if it wants to participate in that field it needs to follow the rules


> HN is not a law enforcement agency for New York City

This is a good way to get subpoanaed, sued, and see every one of your start-ups fined for each and every violating post.


The NYC has a documented complaint process. Start there if you have evidence of a violation. My quick reading of the NYC law tells me HN and other public forums for job postings do not have to enforce the law -- the person/company writing the job posting has to comply. If YC-funded companies break the NYC job posting law I don't see where in the wording of the law that investors have any legal jeopardy.

The law in question only has vague enforcement provisions that include fines "up to $250,000," which means any actual cases brought for enforcement will end up in court in NYC. A civil judge will then get to decide what "good faith" means in each specific case, and also decide questions of jurisdiction and responsibility.


> HN and other public forums for job postings do not have to enforce the law

I don’t think Hacker News faces liability for posting non-compliant ads. (Not a lawyer!) But if it turns out to be a trove of them, HN’s essentially a honey pot.

> any actual cases brought for enforcement will end up in court in NYC

Precisely what you want your early-stage portfolio dealing with.


The way the law reads it looks like someone has to file a complaint. I doubt the NYC Commission on Human Rights has the manpower to scour the internet for violations.

Agree that investors should not tolerate illegal behavior from their portfolio companies, but realistically VCs can't manage every day-to-day detail of their portfolio. And even when they do get involved they can't always control the management -- see Uber, for example. Sometimes the VCs provide the legal cover for questionable behavior because the potential profits outweigh the potential fines and risk of enforcement by well-intentioned but ultimately toothless laws, as I suspect the NYC law will turn out.


> doubt the NYC Commission on Human Rights has the manpower to scour the internet for violations

New York City has no shortage of investigators with overlapping jurisdiction looking for troves of targets.

> VCs can't manage every day-to-day detail of their portfolio

These are job postings on Hacker News!


HN is being payed by these companies for these posts. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard for HN devs to have a running list of states that require salary ranges to be posted, and check against that when the customer submits a request.

Then it will make it easier as more and more states require the bare-minimum worker right of public salaries.


If it's so easy then why not set up a site that enforces the patchwork of local laws and exceptions to filter out non-compliant job postings?

If that existed today I would still choose to see the unfiltered job listings, because if I was looking for a job my goal would come down to "find a job" rather than "make sure all job postings comply with every regulation."


> HN is being payed by these companies for these posts.

that's not true afaik.


Right, I thought this site's whole purpose was to be a relatively high-value and free (to the company posting the ad) place to display certain ads for the companies YC invests in.


HN is not payed for these posts. Who’s Hiring posts are like all others: anyone can comment, and no one on HN ever pays the site operator for the right to post.


This isn't Whos's Hiring posts. These are the job ads you see in the middle of your frontpage. Like now, on spot 14 I see a special post like this:

> Rutter (YC S19) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in NYC (ashbyhq.com)

> https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rutter/7b222f5f-cd46-4592-9cf8-6cd1...

Which I can't comment on, it's just an ad for a YC company.


And Who's Hiring posts are not covered by this law or requirement.

Most jobs have official job postings. It's those that need to carry the salary requirement.

If I'm telling a friend, Hey, there's an opening in my company, you wanna apply, I am not required to tell him the salary range. However, when I point him out to the job application page where he can get more official information on it and can apply for it, that should carry this information, or at least link to it.


> Who's Hiring posts are not covered by this law or requirement.

I don’t think that‘s generally true.

“Any advertisement for a job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that would be performed in New York City is covered by the new law. An ‘advertisement’ is a written description of an available job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that is publicized to a pool of potential applicants. Such advertisements are covered regardless of the medium in which they are disseminated. Covered listings include postings on internal bulletin boards, internet advertisements, printed flyers distributed at job fairs, and newspaper advertisements.” [0]

> Most jobs have official job postings. It's those that need to carry the salary requirement.

What is your reasoning for this? I don’t see anything in the text of the law [1] about “official job postings.”

> If I'm telling a friend, Hey, there's an opening in my company, you wanna apply, I am not required to tell him the salary range.

This at least is correct, because that case is not “a written description [...] that is publicized to a pool of potential applicants.”

[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/Title-8-Text-o...


Regional laws differ, and the exact same text can have completely different implications in another jurisdiction.

For example, Employee-at-will contracts popular in the US are illegal in other zones, and not worth the paper they are printed on in places like Canada.

This is a good reason to always hire a local law firm to review your paperwork, and immigration lawyers to check the intended working arrangements.

Trust that no matter how you personally think things should be done, the law becomes rather expensive if you assume local laws apply internationally.

This lesson is expensive if you learn it the hard way. Also, one may find most firms are allergic to legal posturing, and candidates with an aggressive lack of impulse control. =)


For me the initial response time isn’t the biggest deal (and I’m surprised the effect size of a single day delay is so large). What matters more is having a quick turnaround whenever I give you a set of times from my schedule. Companies are so bad at this that I’ve started giving them only fractions of my available time (which makes it harder to schedule interviews). I’m not sure what the solution is because I can’t give you 100% of my available time if you are going to sit on it for three days before scheduling. I’m talking to other employers and need to schedule things with them too.


I assume this doesn't apply to most YC companies, but the smallest companies (with fewer than four employees) are exempted from the law: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...

It's nice that there's a carveout for small companies, who don't need more friction as they're trying to get off the ground.


because everybody tries to get away with whatever they think they can get away with.

If you maintain this wide-eyed innocence you will be no more than everyone else's victim.


Are salary ranges actually meaningful?

To be fair I don't reply to an offer that does not state the pay, but I've been a victim of bait and switch many times.

Notably, when going through all the interview stages and being told I have been accepted only to find out in the contract that the salary is much different from what has been offered.

They were hoping that I would agree given I have invested so much time going to interviews and so on.

The excuse? "We have gone over budget with hiring and unfortunately now that the maximum we can offer, we are very sorry."


At the very least, the bottom of the pay range is very meaningful to help filter out jobs and save time for everyone.


Curious: can you post a job that isn't for folks in states that have this requirement? Would you have to explicitly say that or only upon inquiry?


Yes. You add that the job doesn't apply to people from Colorado or NY. I've seen a lot of those.


A lot of people are acting out of anger, as if the companies are conspiring to keep the salary secret.

Could it just be they made an innocent mistake?


Is it malicious? Maybe... is it stupidity? Certainly.

Just inform the companies when you see it and then report them if they refuse to disclose and update the listing.

It actually tells you more about the moral compass of the company if they refuse to disclose which I would find valuable.


The real question is why HN is filled with people that have values completely orthogonal to the VC space, like people wanting to leverage the law to make other people do things.


It’s called Hacker News not VC News? There are far more hackers than VCs.

And besides, VCs and their portfolio companies leverage the law to make other people do (or not do) things all of the time. IP law being an obvious example.


That would be even worse, as hackers are by definition rule breakers.


Truthfully I wish HN were detached from the VC culture altogether. There's plenty of good tech discussion here that isn't related to founding companies.

This whole idea that founders and capitalists contribute some special sauce to society and therefore shouldn't be regulated is some old fart libertarian Randian fantasy silliness and I'm glad it's being called out. That sort of thing just doesn't work in civilized society.


Yes! This site can be extremely toxic because of the VC bent.

If someone made a competitor that had just-as-good tech discussion without the VC “value-add”, I’d never come here ever again.

I also like seeing so many of the ruling class get angry and post about requiring salary ranges, it’s been very entertaining this morning :)


This is a site made by a VC, for news on VC startups, for VC startup news consumers.

Its mind-boggling that so many users come here to rant against capitalism, or advocate against startups, or have absolutely no relationship whatsoever with the space. It's not only crazy for me, its crazy for the makers of this site was well!


shrug This is just the culture that evolved here. Not every hacker is a capitalist. And HN's own guidelines welcome "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

The whole salary transparency discussion IS something many hackers find interesting, especially since much of the actual "hacking" is on the labor side rather than the capital side.

I don't think it's hackers' fault that venture capitalism made a bad name for itself. The VCs did that well enough on their own. Hacking culture predates (and will hopefully outlast) tech opportunism.

And I also hope this forum/audience eventually moves to a FOSS, community-supported model instead of being a part of YC. But for now it's where we gather.


> like people wanting to leverage the law to make other people do things.

This is literally everyone in the world, including yourself unless you’re in favor of a lawless society.


I would hope that 'compliance with the law' is not 'completely orthogonal to the VC space' but I've seen an awful lot over the years.


People in "VC space" use laws aplenty to protect their interests as well, as is everyone else who takes part in any civilized society.


Somebody has to keep an eye on you assholes. /grin

However, this community has a lot of intelligent folks who both disagree with my understandings of the world and who have a lot of insight into domains I never want to touch (finance, bigco culture, small-l right libertarian politics).

There are plenty of sane, interesting, well-informed folks here who I vehemently disagree with, and that's a necessary condition of learning about the world.


Because that's where culture is right now...

Nowadays if you're in a professional organization, for example if you're a lawyer, people will make professional complaints against you for your first amendment speech, irrespective of your professional practice. Essentially filing fraudulent complaints to silence you. And they do so as an organized political activity.

And sadly it's been hilariously effective so far.


There is no "first amendment speech" unless it's the government trying to suppress it.


first amendment-protected speech.

You don't give up your rights just because you practice a particular profession.

If you say something that some people don't like, the first step in response shouldn't be them coming after your livelihood.


Title of this post was changed btw: not all NYC companies are not posting salary ranges. And it isn't ONLY an issue in NYC, either. Very misleading title.


Salary ranges with a 60k spread. Progress!

At this point get rid of negotiation straight up. Ether someone is qualified or not.

If not create a junior role for them, or not hire em.


Maybe they are fishing for a willing plaintiff in a planned test case to challenge the law on a constitutional basis.


Report to AG, if a company doesn't incentivize its staff to be legally compliant its a risk to the business


What is the downside of posting a salary range of $1 to $1m for every job? Is there some kind of enforcement that it has to be someone at the company making the amount of money for the job with the same title?


The law states:

> employers advertising jobs in New York City must include a good faith salary range for every job, promotion, and transfer opportunity advertised

I think the question is what is "good faith" and what is the legal test (if there is one) for such a description. I'd love it if a lawyer could pontificate on this.


I think the difference is how loudly they're saying, "!@#$ you, we are in control and will manipulate this process to our advantage."

If the goal is, in good faith, to find someone to do a job, then publishing all known constraints will drastically improve the search. But when they don't do that, it's usually because they want to hold their cards close so that they can both 1) hire someone to fill a _need_ the company has, and 2) pay them as little as possible.

As other comments have discussed, it's kind of a self-own that just makes the process slower and worse and leaves everyone less happy at the end.


I guess for me personally, I have almost always been paid above the salary range for the jobs that I have had so it feels limiting to me.


They just immediately receive the delete button.

Maybe 5 years ago or so, I got an email that sounded good in terms of domain and tech stack, and with good detail on tasks and responsibilities.

As I reached the bottom, I saw a salary heading and assumed it would have a good range. It said something like $80k - $2 million.

Immediately deleted and a filter placed in my email to never hear from them again.


It's acceptable to me.

Is there an obligation in the law to list salary range at every recruiting reference?

If not, is HN now obligated to monitor every official posting for salary range?

If you have a problem with the company, report the company.


> Is there an obligation in the law to list salary range at every recruiting reference?

“Any advertisement for a job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that would be performed in New York City is covered by the new law. An ‘advertisement’ is a written description of an available job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that is publicized to a pool of potential applicants. Such advertisements are covered regardless of the medium in which they are disseminated. Covered listings include postings on internal bulletin boards, internet advertisements, printed flyers distributed at job fairs, and newspaper advertisements.”

— https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...


First, thank you for the reference.

Second, who implements this part?

"Does this new law apply to my job postings?

All employers that have four or more employees or one or more domestic workers are covered by the NYCHRL, including this new provision of the law. As with other provisions of the NYCHRL, owners and individual employers count towards the four employees. The four employees do not need to work in the same location, and they do not need to all work in New York City. As long as one of the employees works in New York City, the workplace is covered.

Employment Agencies are also covered by the new law, regardless of their size. As such, employment agencies must ensure that any job listings they promote or seek to fill comply with the new salary transparency requirements.

Temporary Help Firm Exception: The new law does not apply to temporary help firms seeking applicants to join their pool of available workers. Temporary help firms are businesses that recruit, hire, and assign their own employees to perform work or services for other organizations, to support or supplement the other organization’s workforce, or to provide assistance in special work situations. However, employers who work with temporary help firms must follow the new salary transparency law"


Same thing for anyone posting Colorado jobs


You have to have a certain number of employees for these laws to apply


Specifically, the NY law applies to businesses with 4 or more employees (including owners/founders).


Wow


Awesome


[flagged]


And what's wrong with shedding some light on this behaviour so that it changes and starts complying with the law?

Also: "Your jumping to defend YC companies make me wonder if you're not just a fan boy. Maybe come down form your high horse thinking that you need to defend these YC companies breaking the law?" See where I took it from & how bad it looks?


Why do you accuse OP of being on a "high horse" just for asking this? You're reading quite a lot into this.


The law did have a grace period of nearly a year. It was passed on early December 2021 and only took effect in November 2022.


it's called disruption bb


Because Internet? Because disrupt? Don't you know that human laws do not apply to the cloud? /s


You should stop making YC responsible for what any single portfolio company is doing. That's straight out hilarious. After the firms are out of batch they are independent and autonomous organizations.


As long as these companies keep bragging about being related to YC, anything they do will also reflect on YC. You can't ask people not to associate these things.

And in this case, these ads are given special treatment here on HN. So of course YC owns some part of the responsibility.


They’re advertising here on their platform, so the tie-in is strong.


They want to get all the credit and positive PR when things go well and not have any responsibility when things don’t go well?


It wasn't a single company, it has been a pattern for a while - that's why I made the post.




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