https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857
FWIW, I disagree with this logic
It has nothing to do with the CoL where you live, and everything to do with how much the company values you in that role.
Then why not take what you'd offer to people in the Bay Area and also offer that to people in Warsaw? That's what the author is taking issue with.
EDIT: This was posed as a question for rhetorical purposes, it's obvious that businesses don't do this because they don't have to and it's cheaper not to. Parent said they didn't agree with the author's logic, but the author's statement about companies paying based on value wasn't attempting to make a logical assertion, it was a lament about ethics.
You can see this in how engineers don't volunteer to take pay cuts so janitors and fast food employees get paid the same...
The ethics is also not that simple either. Paying an equal nominal number of dollars to employees on opposite sides of the planet is not necessarily fair and equal in other ways. Those employees may have different benefits, legal rights, legal and tax obligations, and a different standard of life that they can purchase with that nominal amount of dollars.
Welcome to the world - labor is also subject to supply and demand.
Thought experiment: Get a job, then move to a higher COL area, do you expect a raise? No. Move to a lower COL area: Somehow we expect lower salary?
Many companies do have reasons to want employees in high COL areas, e.g. to be closer to the office, closer to customers, or lower travel costs.
And it is not uncommon to receive COL bumps upward when moving to higher cost locations. It is advisable to do this so that you keep your employees happy and don’t have them jump ship to other employers that will pay more.
Nevertheless, the highest tiers on the map are of course on the coasts, with mid-level tiers being parts of Colorado, Texas, Florida, etc. And the lowest tiers reside in flyover country where I live. But they say if you DO move permanently from one tier to another, your pay will be adjusted accordingly.
- It sends a message that the actual compensation is going to be rubbish.
- It sends a message (combined with the evidence from the advert spamming) that the hiring company will be paying different levels of compensation based on where the applicant lives.
That last one is particularly inexcusable. We call it a 'compensation package' for a reason: the employer is compensating the employee for using their expertise, time, and energy to make the employer money. It has nothing to do with the CoL where you live, and everything to do with how much the company values you in that role.
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While I mostly agree with the sentiment I think this is pretty normal and not nearly as much of a faux pas as the author is making it out to be. Kinda applies to a lot of his points - some of these aren’t unequivocally bad hiring practices, they are just polarizing or a matter of pros and cons.
Hot take: a lot of job openings for highly specialized skills or from small-medium sized businesses are not posted with specific salary bands in mind, just “as much as it takes to get a great candidate, but not more than their expected value”. In some cases you could legitimately be open to candidates costing anywhere between $80k and $500k - it looks weird to list a job that way, would you do it? Maybe it turns some candidates off, maybe it prevents scaring off candidates who would be great fits and accept the offer. Maybe it’s not worth getting upset about
Regardless, I think there are underrated issues with mandatory pay bands that aren’t obvious unless you’re on the hiring side. Let’s say you legitimately are open to hiring candidates from anywhere from $100k to $300k. For candidates closer to the $300k end they might not want to apply if they think they might get offered way less than they want, and it might attract a lot of candidates on the $100k end who will make it all the way through the process and then get upset when they’re not offered something closer to $300k. Also, for companies like Canonical, they have enough name recognition and genuine supporters that they probably don’t want to talk to candidates who are only applying because they saw a big number (and if they have to, it makes harder for candidates that are better fits to get noticed).
There’s understandably a lot of strong feelings about hiring practices right now and I know a lot of candidates will tend to assume the worst because of how they’ve been treated by other companies. But sometimes companies just make multiple listings so they show up for candidates around the world instead of as a spam tactic, are flexible on salary, and have a culture that values different things.
Or are the people in that large range interchangeable from the employer's point of view?
And just to add to the Canonical shame too, I’m all for that.
The truth is these companies want Stanford, Oxbridge, MIT engineers for minimum wage or close to free. But of course, no-one that will work to be exploited for their below low-ball offers.
Thus, they scream for the bullshit "skills shortage" delusion. The ones that continue to do this are almost certainly joke companies that can't afford market rate.
At best companies act in good faith but are dysfunctional/incompetent to make this an efficient process. At worst, employers are exploiting the current labor situation to their advantage.
Will this ever change back? I don't think so unless you can eliminate the internet and AI systems.
In my region in the Midwest, we have several well known companies that have been doing this for a very long time. They basically promote the same insane hiring process and then compare their companies hiring process to getting admitted to Harvard - they actually say they're hiring standards are more stringent than Harvard's.
The other funny thing is these same companies who hold themselves out as "elite" pay 30-40% less than market rate. So in essence, you go through some insane hiring process, jumping through all the hoops, and you're still going to end up in a job that pays 30% less than every other company doing two or three interviews before hiring someone.
Will this ever change back? Probably when market dynamics change back in the favor of developers, which could be a very long time. I wholeheartedly believe the "gold rush" of the tech industry has ended. Gone are the days where you had 4-5 different companies vying for your talent year after year after year. The whole industry feels like its contracting.
How do I know? I did it. A couple years ago, I wanted to make a move to full-time remote work. I liked the people that I worked with, but I spent over a decade there, management started going downhill, and I could tell the company was on a trajectory of slow death. I spent HOURS almost every day for six months applying to jobs on LinkedIn. I restricted myself to positions that I thought I was actually qualified for without stretching. I avoided consulting/MSP companies. I probably applied to well over a hundred positions.
How many responses did I get? Zero. Not a single one. Occasionally, a recruiter would ping me and say they had a job opening that was a perfect fit. Every single time, it ended up being a contract position.
I DID eventually find my current job on LinkedIn, but only because I recognized the company name as one that a friend of mine moved to 6 months earlier. I called him up, asked him how it was, and he provided a referral. It dawned on me after I accepted the offer that every SINGLE job I have ever had was either through a friend's referral or because I knew the manager beforehand. The old adage, "it's who you know," is still as relevant as ever.
Glassdoor hasn’t been a good barometer for anything. When your reviews get removed because the company paid them, you’re just being shown what the company wants you to see. Their salary data is highly inaccurate and deflates the industry wages. That site needs to be banished into non existence.
Seriously, I don't trust Glassdoor at all and stopped looking at it.
Finding a current employee through a friend or knowing one seems to be the only way to get any accurate feedback.
Possibly seeing how company treats customers could be another point.
Glassdoor does not remove reviews for payment.
That one grinds my gears, i couldn't remember or pull school records now if i wanted to.
latexr•2h ago
Why would they be unemployed? Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, is reportedly obsessed with high school performance, to the point of rejecting otherwise highly competent candidates who passed the whole process before that based on high school questions alone.
ravedave5•2h ago
codr7•1h ago
siva7•2h ago
jvanderbot•2h ago
stripe_away•1h ago
You qualified for the interview, but did they qualify for you?
PhantomHour•2h ago
There's two big reasons this is such a red flag: 1) Come on. Unless you are hiring highschool graduates directly, you have other means of finding out how good candidates are. If a highschool report card tells you more about a candidate than your own interview process, you need to fire everyone involved with that process.
2) Highschool performance is highly correlated with a bunch of causes that are very undesirable things to proxy-measure in your hiring process.
In the UK, where Canonical and Mark hail from, high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well. You need to be careful with such measures, as selecting job candidates based on class or race is both unethical and commonly illegal.
Again consider that these are high school results. A person who is born to unlucky schooling opportunities can still compensate for the learning they were deprived of by working harder in college/university or their formal career after that.
whimsicalism•2h ago
> high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well.
the degree to which this claim about wealth is true is impacted by confounders. it is generally less true than commonly stated. outside of the public sector, that a measure is correlated with race/ethnicity/class does not make it a priori illegal to hire based on.
herodoturtle•2h ago
Minor nitpick, but Mark hails from (and was schooled in) South Africa.
Agree with your overall point.
VirusNewbie•2h ago
Right but given the pay, talent level, and more from Canonical, they should probably not be trying to invent new ways to filter candidates beyond what even top tier software shops are doing.
If Jane Street and Anthropic aren't rejecting candidates for high school performance, maybe your mid tier company with low tier pay shouldn't be either.
whimsicalism•2h ago
rvz•1h ago
Exactly spot on.
Surely everyone would also agree with this and at this point, just don't bother with Canonical and ignore them. They do it because they are not interested in hiring at all, even if the post is there.
Would much rather go to Anthropic if I had my time again, which there is far more upside and pays extremely well than whatever pathetic amount Canonical could ever come up with.
rvz•1h ago
who....cares?
I think we need to ask ourselves why we put up with this nonsense. Not even the serious tech companies and adjacent care about that aspect of your performance.
He would certainly have passed on Linus Torvalds if he applied to work at Canonical - because he did not got to some well known top high school or get the top marks Shuttleworth wanted.
latexr•29m ago
> who....cares?
Presumably everyone reading the article. It’s about bad hiring practices and uses Canonical as the example, thus Canonical’s CEO and their inane contributions to the hiring practices at their own company are relevant to the discussion.
ohreallx•1h ago
jacobsenscott•1h ago
corytheboyd•1h ago