I prefer ranges. Not all candidates are same even for the same job. If I hire an A player, I may give them a bit more to sweeten the deal. If I hire a B player (who is good enough for the role but is not an A player so far), I would negotiate the compensation a little early on as long as it is something the candidate B accepts.
Range gives you the floor (if they are honest). Let's say the range is 65k-85K, then its fair game to say that the best candidate may get 85K but a good enough may only get 65K or say 70K. Also as a candidate if you are looking for 100K min, you know this position is not for you.
What I don't like about this is that people really aren't A players or B players in practice. It's not a video game, real life is messy. In some situations, a B player can be an A player, and vice versa. Past performance does not indicate future results, and in my experience usually the best worker is the one who has simply been given a chance and the freedom to self optimize their job for some months, and rarely are they the most qualified applicant. No one is good at their job on day one nor should they be expected to be.
There are too many confounding variables involved with the very abstract concept of 'work effort,' for it to be reliably used. Instead, set a price for the role, and if someone is exceeding their anticipated productivity and putting more work on their back, give them a raise.
I think if you're at the level of A or B player, then you're already at the top of the field. There's a lot more letters in the alphabet, and a lot more difference in experience that people can have.
My company for example will hire F players. We'll even hire G or H players too. Those are the roles that we are actually hiring for when we open up an entry level job. However if a C player comes along, naive and fresh out of a masters program, we'll also snap them up and pay an absolutely exorbitant rate compared to the normal salary range for their position because we want them to stay for at least 5 years. In 5 years, if they improve they'll be A or B players and we'll bump them into Director level roles in the hope that they will stay due to the responsibility and freedom the role offers even though we can't pay Google-level salaries.
Having a posted initial salary will just scare off a candidate who is unnaturally good versus the rest of the local market.
Disclaimer:
I like to think I am/was a solid C rated developer. If you are an A player, I bow to your wisdom. I have never applied to FAANG. I know I wouldn't make even the phone cut.
What if the candidate applies to the wrong one, but would be suitable for a different one. At that point it's not much different to just having a range on their in the first place.
it's completely different - Google for example will down level you based on performance. if you have candidates that have the same job with wildly different salaries which just exacerbates arbitrary inequities. the range solution also creates problems when handling promotions
the one who benefits the most from the "range" solution is the employer, really.
> if you have candidates that have the same job with wildly different salaries
How do you classify something as the same job versus a different job though? Two developers may have roughly similar responsibilities but one may be much better than the other. And it would be reasonable to pay them more in those circumstances, but it's very hard to quantify that objectively.
Also, Google is a huge company so they can advertise 5 jobs at different levels and fill them all. Whereas smaller companies may want someone and not be too sure about what level they need: it may depend more on who they can get. They can't afford to be too picky.
I've gotten multiple jobs in life where I was able to negotiate a much larger salary then they had intended to pay due to being of more worth to them once they interviewed me.
So that would be done away with? No thanks. I'm happy that people have varying skillsets and that employers can pay more or less for a posting based on the person they choose.
I think you're guilty of falling prey to the "decoy effect" here. The labor market is a carnival, and they're selling tokens to you. You can buy 25 tokens for 10 dollars or 15 tokens for 5 dollars. The latter strategy is locally optimal, and you are using that as an argument for it's global optimality. That's exactly the point of the con though. Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it.
>Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it.
Workers also do not want to work cheaper than they can get, and last I checked, there's over 5 million companies in the US, and plenty of evidence that those companies are competing for labor.
So they do bid on labor. If a company does not match it's competitors, employees move. And a company has every incentive to pay more than competitors, up to the break even point, since it gets them better employees.
Even if a few companies collude, it open the door for a competitor to break ranks and steal employees. This breaking of ranks is prevalent in all sorts of cartels around the world - it's nearly impossible to make companies stick to an agreement when by breaking it they can gain advantage over rivals.
The carnival metaphor makes little sense. Employees and employers are in a market trading goods, nothing more, nothing less.
No, he's not. That's what gets lost in the shuffle in discussions like this. He is saying it works for him and like it or not, that's what the vast majority of people care about. What's In It For Me?
No, that's a mischaracterization of my argument. The decoy here is the lower salary that was the supposedly "market rate" salary for the work he does. That price wasn't advertised publicly in a central market for job listings, so it's an unrelated third option that is dominated by his current strategy that drives him to believe that his current strategy is globally optimal, despite tremendous evidence to the contrary. He would make more money if he could sort job listings by offered salary.
Range gives you the floor (if they are honest). Let's say the range is 65k-85K, then its fair game to say that the best candidate may get 85K but a good enough may only get 65K or say 70K. Also as a candidate if you are looking for 100K min, you know this position is not for you.