[BlargMcLarg]

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

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

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

>1 Appreciation for your work

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

>2 Good relationships with colleagues

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

>3 Good work-life balance

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

[Varqu]

I agree on that and we had similar observations on the job boards that we manage (each of them has mandatory salary brackets if you want to post a job[1])

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

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

- publishing tech stacks & engineering methodologies is quite useful too

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

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

[1] https://swissdevjobs.ch/

https://devitjobs.uk/

https://devitjobs.us/

https://germantechjobs.de/

[ipaddr]

Getting that good work life balance issue settled usually takes 2 or 3 rounds to pry some useful info out.

[BlargMcLarg]

Great. We're talking about responding to an ad. Your response equates to just dealing with 1-4 hours of work, often requiring some juggling from the candidate's side (= more time), just to get some of the most important information.

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

[jaredsohn]

>Not only are you supporting my argument, you're also showcasing how ridiculously inefficient the hiring process is

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

[nibbleshifter]

Not really.

I'm paid to work 40h/week.

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

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

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

[bastardoperator]

This isn't how salaried position work though, not in the US anyways. You will get paid X if you work 10 hours a week or X if you work 50 hours a week. There is no difference in pay. Would you be open to losing pay? Do you want to be accountable for every single hour of work you do? Most don't.

[nibbleshifter]

I'm not in the US, but I work for a US based company.

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

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

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

[bastardoperator]

Thats a contract position, not a salaried position. Most tech job in the US do not pay hourly. A salaried position says you will make X per year including benefits like unlimited PTO, 401K matching, reserved stock units, discount stock purchasing program, life insurance, medical insurance, etc... There is also no logging of time because your pay cannot be raised or reduced on a weekly basis.

[joe5150]

jobs on salaries still have an expectation of how many hours you will work and some provide PTO comp for "overtime". tracking this often does mean filling out a time sheet or punching a clock, even though those times don't directly figure into your paycheck.

[Amezarak]

I've been in the workforce for more than a decade and every salaried job was a minimum of 40 hours. At best you could comp time for the next week, but only up to so many hours.

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

[germandiago]

This is a difficult topic. We evolved to the 40h/week mentality. This is a big luck for us.

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

[d4mi3n]

This is a management problem, not an employee problem. Figuring out if I can be outperformed by someone working less hours than me is irrelevant to my relationship to my employer. I'd go further to say that it's irrelevant barring frequency of the event having an impact on the broader job market. For any team, you will have a range of performance. For any individual, you will have different work styles.

This is normal. This is OK.

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

[germandiago]

There is always a feedback cycle also I think. You can tell your manager why something could work or not. The manager is the responsible from the direction POV but it is also true that we are responsible to some extent of how we perform. Maybe not from an executive or strategic POV but yes from a deliver-what-you-are-asked for POV.

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

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

[d4mi3n]

I don't disagree with the fact that we should manage our performance (and career growth!), but this is a problem for after one is hired. I'm not even sure how you'd go about putting reasonable or realistic expectations on somebody's performance until you interview them and make them an offer for a specific title or role.

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

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

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

[the_arun]

Work Life Balance is purely subjective & depends on personal preferences. Your balance in life != mine.

It also depends on :

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

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

[BlargMcLarg]

Whether it's subjective or not doesn't matter to the topic at hand.

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

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

[Broken_Hippo]

Sure, your life balance doesn't equal mine. That doesn't mean that either of us should be expected to work more or less. If you want to work more, get a second job or invest time into a structured hobby.

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

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