[GreenPlastic]

Fair enough, but the information is publicly available on glassdoor.

A couple reasons why I didn't list comp:

1. I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area. 2. Cash comp isn't core to how the company markets itself to employees and its culture. The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.

Like the article hypothesizes, I thought we'd get 50-100 resumes because it's so easy to apply for jobs on the internet and was surprised at how few we actually got.

[eropple]

> I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area.

This is an extreme red flag for me. While your motives may be better, as I don't know you and won't assume, I've never met a potential employer who said that who wasn't trying to run a cult. I contend that there is no "employee friendly" company (outside of cooperatives, which don't really exist in tech) and that company culture is generally used to exert pressure to make people overwork themselves for somebody else's gain.

The best people, as well as best developers, I've ever worked with are nearly fully coin-operated (with obvious carve-outs for "not working for terrible people," etc.). They do excellent work, expect to be paid well for it, and go home.

If they "play hard," it's not with their co-workers.

[irremediable]

Despite agreeing a lot with your sentiments, I don't exactly agree with what you said. Agreed that fair compensation is crucial. Agreed that sensible hours are important. Agreed that too many places fail to give these to their employees.

However, I've known lots of companies who offer good compensation and good work-life balance, but still think it's important to be "employee-friendly". Again, agreed that there can be conflicts of interest, especially in a non-cooperative model. But still, happy employees tend to be more useful employees. It can be useful to hire people whose motivation isn't solely limited to the compensation.

[bjelkeman-again]

Beyond the cooperatives you can also run non-profit organisations with a business model. They can be without any owners, so you are not working for someone else's gain in the same way you do for a company. We have that where I work.

[eropple]

Yeah, I can see that model working. Checking out your site, your company sounds interesting and I'd love to learn more. Want to drop me an email? It's in my profile. =)

[kevin_thibedeau]

You should read up on how the Clif bar company is run. Pro employee businesses do exist.

[ryandrake]

Everyone is different, but I would always take a job posting more seriously if it listed at least a salary _range_. I at least know I'm not wasting my time going thorough the whole process only to learn that the comp package is way below what I would accept. Yea, there's always Glassdoor for that, but I'm not sure how much I trust that site's data.

[aerique]

Exactly, I wouldn't consider a job posting that doesn't mention salary seriously either. It reeks too much of a job that wants to take advantage of you while paying peanuts.

[reagency]

Almost no job postings mention salary, and most jobs are filled. Certainly the hundreds of thousands of bigco job ads don't post salaries, and startups don't either. Government does.

[aerique]

Perhaps it's different in the US. Most job postings here in the Netherlands at least mention a salary range.

[logicallee]

you leave out a very important segment of the job market, which is recruiters - who know salary ranges (part of the information they receive) and can match them to salary expectations before proceeding.

[rch]

Even when a CEO overhears a personal conversation and approaches to say they are looking for X, Y, and Z so I should contact the CTO directly, and here's his email, etc... I'm reticent to pursue the introduction. It's worse if such a person mentions beer and foosball.

[Sir_Substance]

>The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.

You can sell your company however you like, but at the end of the day, you're offering to pay me money for my time. It's an important part of my assessment of your job offer that I know how much. Sending out CV's is stressful, and I have to prep for interviews on a per-job basis.

If you won't tell me how much you pay until after the interview, your job offer gets put on the "too coy to be worth dealing with" pile, along with all the people who only let you contact them via webform.

[JamesBarney]

This is how I see the problem.

Here are some assumptions.

1. You're ideal ios dev is working. The unemeployment rate among good ios devs is 0%.

2. He is probably getting paid above market wage.

3. He doesn't have a lot of time to research positions.

4. Most job openings are shitty because shitty job openings take longer to fill than good ones(or never get filled).

5. Your ideal ios dev doesn't have time to look up glass door salaries on every job that comes along on indeed. So they probably won't look up yours.

So how do you differentiate yourself to your would-be dev? Well you could tell them that you have an AMAZING-COOL workplace with GREAT people. Problem is even terrible companies say they have an AMAZING-COOL workplace, sometimes even more vocally then legitimately great workplaces. So whats an employer to do? Put your money where your mouth is. Tell your prospective employees that you offer above average compensation[0]. This signalsthat your workplace takes their devs seriously. It will tell them your employer hires professionals who take software seriously. And a a workplace that respects their devs, and hires great people, that IS an AMAZING-COOL workplace where I and many other devs want to work.

[0] - Use actual numbers because many employers are in denial about what the actual market rate is.

TL;DR - The only honest signal a company can give me in a job ad is compensation and from that signal I extrapolate working conditions, culture, and caliber of workers.

[deciplex]

Exactly. The clearest signal that a company can send that it is truly a good place to work, is to pay a good salary. A strong commitment there implies strong commitments elsewhere. It's not always the case, of course, but you can trust numbers a lot more than you can trust rhetoric and promises. (Not to mention, it's easier to measure, as well.)

[logicallee]

it's interesting that you state in point 2 that the dev is "probably getting paid above market wage" - because normally, if someone is PROBABLY getting paid X then X is not above market rate: x is market rate. (Another way to state 'market rate' is 'is probably getting paid x').

It would be like saying that listing a used iPhone on eBay will probably fetch more than its market price on eBay. It kind of doesn't make any sense at all.

However, it certainly can make sense if you define "market rate" more broadly than the amount that ideal devs are themselves earning. If you define market rate as the rate for all devs, then the ideal dev may be making more. So what this really means is that ideal candidates have a much higher market rate than the general market rate.

If this is the case, then advertising that much-higher market rate will very possibly flood the advertiser with applications from average devs (the broader market).

But if this segmentation isn't what you mean, then it's very hard to interpret your point 2, and I would like you to expand on it.

[weland]

The usual reason is #3. You're only willing to pay shit and instead of compensating for that with actually useful things, you're selling philosophy and crap like "company culture", as if a company that's not at least 15 years old can have that.

The reasons you listed are all nice, but most of the people who do it are doing it for reasons like #3 above. You risk ending up in the same pot as they do.

[mhurron]

> I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area.

All I see is an employer who isn't willing to pay, and then I move on from that listing.

Even with how little time and work goes to sending a resume now, you're listing hasn't made it worth the time it does take.

[sergiosgc]

>The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.

For senior good developers, an employee friendly culture is an hygienic factor, not a competitive factor. By not posting compensation you cheated yourself out of your order winner.

[mattmanser]

The other problem other people aren't mentioning is that you will have been excluded from all searches where the job hunter put in a minimum salary.

I have no idea how common it is, but I certainly used that option when I looked for jobs. Otherwise you have to wade through all the shitty jobs.

[jasonlotito]

> but the information is publicly available on glassdoor.

So...

> 1. I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area

...you provide the information only for those you don't want?

> 2. Cash comp isn't core to how the company markets itself to employees and its culture. The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.

By hiding information away? By pretending to know their motives? When I don't see this information listed, I make an assumption that they are paying market rates, which are substantially lower. While the work itself is important as well, so is supporting my family. And if a company can't be upfront and honest with me from the beginning, that doesn't bode well for the future.

[fsloth]

I am perplexed that while hiring developers you fail to list comp. Being a programmer is a job where one can wield incredible leverage - both positive and negative. People who have at least a tiny bit of experience as developers should realise this. And if they have any competence, expect to be paid accordingly. Cheap developers speak to me of co-workers who are clueless, or, are forces to work in a toxic environment that wrecks their productivity (thus reducing the compensation that is percieved as rational)

If I work for a for-profit I expect to profit as per my market value...

[stormbrew]

> The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.

I know of companies that have literally won awards for being 'best places to work' that treat their employees like disposable work units to have every last ounce of motivation wrung out of them through gaslighting and cultish "we're just a family here!" I know this from knowing people who actually work there and I'd have to be pretty desperate to work for them.

Needless to say I, personally, don't really put much stock in how companies sell themselves on the soft side of things any more. I suspect a lot of people with a bit more experience don't.

[rch]

Being employee friendly is a minimum requirement. Unless you're offering something truly extraordinary, it is probably going to be difficult to differentiate yourself in that regard.

[jp10558]

My biggest problem is that for me, total compensation package is easily the most important thing. It's simple, I need to feel and notice more money for me to move from my current job.

I can get job offers. What I can't get is offers that work out to be more money after adjusting for cost of living and benefits - as well as life impact of moving. I might just be at a personal maximum - I'm not worth more to anyone else. So far I'm fine with that.

What I hate though is spending weeks doing application, phone interview, fly or drive for hours for full day interview, suit, etc - to then finally get what the salary is. And I know instantly that that salary is too low and turn them down. What's worse is my most recent expectation asked desired salary. I gave a number. They came back with 1/3 less than that number. Sure I will negotiate, but 1/3 is a big mismatch... I mean, why did they ever even contact me?

[deciplex]

Everyone tries to market themselves as being an employee-friendly place to work, even if (or maybe especially if) they aren't. It is very difficult for a candidate to separate signal and noise here. On the other hand, a salary is a salary. Anyone's primary motivation in working for your company is going to be the compensation - why are you pretending otherwise, and selecting for candidates who will play along with this pretense?

Where 'employee-friendliness' comes into the picture more is in retention and it can have a big impact there, since once a person is working for you they will know very quickly whether the employee-friendliness rhetoric is steeped in bullshit, or not. But it is not a very effective recruitment tool except perhaps with the very naive i.e. people just joining the job market.

[hassiktir]

Yep, I don't get why people act like being an "employee-friendly place to work" is a perk, I've never seen a job posting or had a recruiter contact me with "well we aren't a very good place to work, but we pay 2x above to compensate."

If anything, I think I've realized from my limited experience that companies who push how great their culture is are usually the ones with really high turnover and HR is being pressured into creating an environment (on job sites and screening) that new dev's want to work at.

[curun1r]

iOS developers are hugely in demand these days. And while others have questioned your tactics during the job posting phase, I'm willing to bet you've put as little thought into the phase before that as well. Are you blogging, speaking at conferences and meet ups or putting out open source projects? You need to be putting significant effort into making your engineering brand mean something to the candidates you're trying to reach so that in the brief moment when they're deciding whether to send you their resume, you've given them some reason to believe that you're an above average place to work.

It amazes me that in a field that preaches understanding the customer to build a product that resonates, we haven't bothered to look at the hiring process the same way. And it should be even easier to do considering our target market is made up of people very similar to ourselves. When I started hiring, I didn't have much success until I started to look at what type of ads resonated with me and the ways that I went about looking for work. I spent weeks going through job postings collecting ones that I felt I'd apply to if I didn't have a job and then started to look for themes.

One theme I found was that they didn't follow the 3-part format with a description of the company, description of the skills desired and description of the likely tasks of the position. And not one of them included the bit about "working closely with the product manager"...there's no surer sign of uninteresting work than that cliché.

But biggest theme I found was that I had heard of and formed a positive impression about the companies posting the ads I was interested in. A good example of a relatively small company that I feel has done a good job with this is Segment.io. They've discussed their transition from primarily NodeJS to Go very publicly as well as a few other technical topics which led me to investigate their Github repository a few months before. So when I saw one of their ads, it immediately registered as one I would have applied to if I needed work.

And lastly, I realized that I haven't found a job from a job posting in over a decade. It's really a pretty crappy way to connect with employers. Every job I've gotten since the downturn has been the result of either a referral from a former coworker or a pre-existing connection that I've made with others from the technical community. I realized during the downturn that if something like that happened again, I wanted to be prepared, so I started building connections that I could reach out to to find work. Those connections are such a better way to find work since it's essentially like sending a proxy you trust through the interview process to weed out the companies that aren't worth working for. And those connections are also a great way to bring find great people to bring into any work quality work environment.

Hiring is hard for people who aren't willing to put in the effort or want to see it as a process that you only put effort into during the hiring phase. It gets significantly easier when you view it as a continual process to position yourself (or, more accurately, whoever is your employer at the time) as an appealing place for your ideal candidates to work. Put yourself in their shoes and design your hiring process in the customer-centric process you're probably already using for your actual produce and you'll be a lot more successful.