When I see a job posting with no wage information, I assume they are paying 50% of what a similar job pays on the mid-to high end.
So for a job that you'd see list at $140-180k, I'm guessing they are looking to pay $60-80k. It just doesn't seem worth the time to craft a cover letter, application, couple hours of interviews...
One of the few FAANG/MAGMA companies I've applied to repeatedly and never heard back. I may not be tailoring my experience to match their culture slides correctly.
Usual practice is to tailor your resume to match the job posting, emphasizing points of agreement. Is Netflix a special case where you have to look up the company values/culture and amend to match that?
I can't get a response from Netflix but I do get from others. I know they're big on their culture and maybe it's worth it to tweak the resume specifically to address those. If I knew I would be working there lol.
> among the wages that are posted, high wage firms are more opaque, with more and wider ranges
That seems about what I'd expect. From the entire universe of job postings, I'd expect jobs at the lower end of the compensation range to have less potential for productivity differences among employees and, therefore, less range in posted compensation.
Roles with higher likely productivity variability among employees would be likely to fall into one of two buckets: variability ranging from some middling amount to very high, where firms would try to find those high-performing employees who could perform at the higher end of the range and variability ranging from some middling amount to very low, which roles would tend to have narrow ranges and companies hoping to find adequate employees to fill them and perform at the middling performance.
Also, in higher earning roles and industries (e.g. tech), a high % of compensation is in equity. So you'll see some roles advertise wages as $180k-$280k but actual compensation be in the range of $600k-$1M (made up but realistic numbers).
I agree there is variability. I don't think equity is really a high percent for most tech jobs though. The big companies do it, the startups do it, but the mid size companies don't seem to. Most private companies (that aren't startups) don't seem to either.
Also, $600k-1M seems insane to me. Those can't be more than a fraction of 1% of the tech market.
That's only true in US though. Being paid in options/shares in Europe is pretty rare(not unheard of, but rare - and even then we're talking like €20k of shares that mature in 4 years, not hundreds of thousands)
As a salesperson at a large SaaS firm, I wouldn't want to work for an organization that doesn't have wide variability in compensation. My team had one rep who earned around $180k, and another who earned more than $400k, even though they have the exact same job title and responsibilities, which is how it should be.
I’m guessing the difference in pay was because of commissions? Sales is about the only role with fairly crystal clear performance metrics that can be evaluated unbiased (ie how much they made in sales).
For most other roles, compensation is largely based upon negotiation (which is not a core job skill for a random engineer), and variability in salary tends to be more inequitable — if they have he same job title and responsibilities, metrics on performance are not going to be clear cut like sales numbers, but be more subjective and interpreted by management.
I worked at a hedge fund where almost everyone was "Member of Technical Staff". That could be a 21 year old college graduate or a 50 year-old ex-staff engineer. I'm pretty sure the ratio of highest to lowest paid was 3:1 and likely even greater.
Most of the laws which require public disclosure of compensation in job postings apply only to base salary, not to total compensation. What you describe makes sense for performance-based portions of a compensation package like commissions or performance-driven bonuses, but not for base salary.
Do you really think a wide base salary range makes sense for the same job title and responsibilities, aside from maybe any location-based differentials? I don’t.
This is kind of what happens in practice though isn't it?
Maybe not every single person, but certainly outliers who are making way more than their peers get a new job, or the same job title with "principal" or "executive" slapped on front.
MLB pitcher. NFL quarterback. Movie actor. Book author. Quant trader. Mutual fund analyst. Commodities trader. Salesperson. Lawyer. Head coach. CEO. CTO.
IMO, software engineer is also among the jobs where a wide range of performance is evidenced from among the people who are qualified to hold the position.
"IMO, software engineer is also among the jobs where a wide range of performance is evidenced from among the people who are qualified to hold the position."
Including those of us who hold the position but are not qualified.
Bill Belichick suggests rent seekers propped up by an entire organization is the norm. Good players wanted to play with Brady, not for Belichick.
None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food.
Capitalism only exists as a socialized meme there’s a communal upside to capitalism. What’s the communal value to propagating Bezos and Belichick types specifically deserve special privileges if they’re so dependent?
New idea; if Musk can survive in the wilds of Alaska for a month he can stay rich. Let them prove it’s not just propagation of memes via media that keeps us talking about how great they are.
> None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food.
Cumulative productivity gains from valuable inventions and systems are the reason that we aren't all spending our days growing food to survive. IMO, that's a very, very good thing and society should support those advances to be created.
Your generalization leaves a lot of wiggle room for how society ought to support cumulative gains.
Because we have accumulated less need for data entry and content jobs thanks to AI office workers could do more of the real work to provide for their real needs to afford manual labor class time to focus on the abstract.
The god father of capitalism, Adam Smith, is said to have written that division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
Kind of feels as if, while we ride career escalators, externalization of all our other work, is fostering a prisoners dilemma society finds itself in as the number of have nots rapidly outpaces the haves. The majority are all “this is all I know, I can’t get off the debt service tread mill.”
Put some of the real work of keeping themselves alive on billionaires and they’re too busy to spend all their time propagating their Ponzi schemes.
Are you imagining some change in the overall system that would serve to increase the amount of manual work done by humans in a way that would disproportionately hit the billionaire class?
This doesn't make sense from the hiring side to me. I have a small agency with 10 employees and it's just common sense to put salary info in the job listing.
Otherwise we both waste each other's time if it's not up to their expectations. What is the benefit of obscuring it until it's time to present an offer?
Yeah I don’t understand why they are so cagey. I’ve been flown out, stayed at hotels, burned hours of their employees time in interviews, and then get a ridiculous low ball and things grind to a halt. Maybe I have a very punchable face and they think they can get me on the cheap? No idea
inconsistent incumbent pay scales is the main limiting factor for publishing pay scale. Basically, there are a lot of employees in a lot of employers that have pay all over the map, due to lack of compensation policy / hiring manager (in)discretion.
One of the reasons why most job spam from recruiters is absolutely garbage, there's no pay ranges listed. I'm already not interested and good luck getting me to dig deep to see what the actual pay range is
I just respond to the recruiter with something like this - that sounds like something I can do however I am currently making X - so I'm not really going to be interested in moving for less than X + Y or some other benefits combination that equals that kind of increase in value.
This then generally leads to another message where they say oh we can't and I say hey that's fine, best of luck.
Basically for me to consider moving I would need to make at least 1 extra month's worth of money every 6 months, so two extra months per year.
on edit: maybe it is different for people in the U.S / Bay area? That is to say maybe there are regulations or just a general cultural thing that means the recruiters here (Denmark) are more straightforward
A lot of discussion in this thread seems to be ignoring the subjectivity in defining what a job is. Job analysis and design is a fascinating topic and should become more important with "AI" changing the way we work. Unfortunately it's a topic covered mostly by HR consultants (it would benefit greatly from interest from the HN crowd).
edit: to avoid confusion, I'm talking about "a job" as "a collection of similar positions", an Job Analysis as a "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities"
> A lot of discussion in this thread seems to be ignoring the subjectivity in defining what a job is
Wage-based employment is not subjective, it is a formally defined and legally-regulated practice. You can call contract work a "job" but it's not relevant to the topic at hand—wages.
That's not what my comment is about. That's a contractual distinction.
In the context of HR, a "Job" is a collection of similar positions, an Job Analysis is "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities".
> In the context of HR, a "Job" is a collection of similar positions, an Job Analysis is "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities".
Companies that don’t have a good picture of what they want or need for an individual role are rarely good places to work for. Generally, this means “we will pile on whatever responsibilities we feel like and without paying you more.”
If this means that job postings make for poor wage research data, as the abstract claims, then researchers should use The Work Number! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753
So for a job that you'd see list at $140-180k, I'm guessing they are looking to pay $60-80k. It just doesn't seem worth the time to craft a cover letter, application, couple hours of interviews...