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by dsacco 3312 days ago
> Salary: very good

I hate to do this on this thread, but - commit to an explicit salary range or don't put anything down about it. What is "very good"? You might as well say "competitive" - it offers exactly the same transparency as if you had listed nothing, because it's qualitative, not quantitative.

What am I supposed to think after reading that description? "Very good" for me personally means north of $200k - for someone else it could be significantly higher or lower. But we don't really get the benefit of knowing if your "very good" matches our "very good."

It's particularly disingenuous to me to list salary as if you're going to be transparent about it, then slap something on there that just maintains the information asymmetry you had before. At least the other companies who list nothing at all are forthright in their lack of salary transparency.

To be clear, I'm not taking a side on salary transparency. I'm specifically saying you should take a side here, instead of trying to have your cake and eat it too. If your salary range is actually "very good" for that skillset, you will find that the right people are applying. Would you be interested in a SaaS product that said "Very Expensive" on its pricing page, instead of a) listing actual, quantifiable pricing or b) not listing pricing and requiring a sales call?

1 comments

I hear you, and I'm not trying to be cagey here. I'm in the market for a very specific set of skills. The talent/experience/ability for this position varies wildly from "I know of Hive" to "I implemented the Hive CBO, check out my commits". What would I pay for the later? I'm not actually sure what the upper limit would be. I think for the average "engineer/programmer" job there is a pretty well known salary distribution and I know that we are on the upper end of, which is why I put "very good". For a specific specialist job like this putting a salary seems like a mistake, and not putting a salary seems like you are probably cheap. I might pay you north of $200k, but I if everyone that applies assumes they are going to make >$200k, it would be hard to take a less qualified person and adjust their expectations down, even if they would be a great hire for us. It's lose-lose I guess. Thanks for the feedback.
What you've offered (range of salary, could be near 200k depending on seniority) provides useful information than 'very good' which is what they were referring too.

thank you for providing your reasoning and feedback.