[jacalata]

So you're asking people to apply for a job without telling them how much you will pay, and you think that this lack of information shouldn't affect whether they apply? Salary sensitive potential hires might be ruling themselves out at the application stage: for instance my assumption (as a software engineer) would be that if I have no idea what your salary offer will be, then it will be shit - if it's going to be decent then you'd advertise that publicly. Therefore people that actually apply to your company is the subset that either find out your salary beforehand (eg by knowing someone else there) or don't care what salary you offer or I guess there might exist people who think it makes sense to keep good wages secret.

[jshen]

Show me a company that advertises it publicly.

[jacalata]

1. http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffe...

2. glassdoor.com

3. my network of people who work at various companies and will tell me what they make.

I'm assuming that you are a small company that doesn't actually show up in either of 2 or 3.

[mehrdada]

If no one is doing it, perhaps it's worth trying?

[jshen]

Perhaps I have an invisible dragon in my garage.

What do you think is more likely, that no one is doing it because it's highly effective or that no one is doing it because it causes problems?

[nostrademons]

The answer to that could very well be "Yes".

I've found that most practices that make for visionary, distinctive companies are both highly effective and cause large problems. For example, Google has a massive shared codebase, does promotion & performance reviews via peer feedback, and shares information very widely inside the company at the expense of being a black box externally. Fog Creek makes all salary data public within the company. Palantir, I've heard, pays all engineers the same (relatively low) salary but doubles down on perks and work environment. Apple under Steve Jobs let the CEO berate any employee over the slightest product detail. Facebook releases new software via IRC chatroom.

All of these practices cause major problems, but they also fix major problems. Moreover, they're distinctive. They draw a certain type of employee, one who's willing to give up convenience in some dimension to gain autonomy, or excellence, or collaboration. It's often better to be differentiated than good.

[jshen]

Could be yes and is likely to be yes are very different things. Since you mentioned fog creek, notice they don't publicly publish their salaries.