Why doesn't YC list compensation for their own open positions?

Here's the problem with non-deterministic conversations: everyone has an opinion (fair enough), and is willing to state it with the authority of a highly experienced subject matter expert.

In deterministic conversations, a naive opinion stated with a lot of authority would be shut down quite quickly (eg: many areas in programming where you can quickly prove something to be right or wrong). You can't do that in politics, business, and many other areas. As a result, we have about 8 billion politicians and business experts.

The author is making the assumption that listing a salary is connected to being a progressive business. A bunch of other people take this a step further and state how not listing the salary is a part of some conspiracy (in YC's case, apparently this is an attempt to lower the payroll costs of their portfolio companies).

The reality is that even the most transparent companies out there (eg: Gitlab) do not disclose individual salaries. No, it has nothing to do with some secret plan to underpay anyone or certain groups. It's simply a fact that people become incredibly irrational when it comes to compensation, and the minute you lay it out in the open, you open up a huge surface area for conflict. Last year we learned that encouraging political activism at work has a similar dynamic, and many companies have made that a no go zone as well. It's not because they are racist or don't care - it's because it takes a tiny minority of people to get the entire business derailed, and it's hard enough to keep that from happening in the best of times; once you add a catalyst like salaries or politics, it's like adding fuel to the fire.

But rather than ask ourselves why the leaders at Gitlab and millions of others companies have made the decisions they did, it's a lot easier to just make assumptions - "it must be coming from a bad place, so let me brainstorm what some of those bad places could be."

I'll take it a step further - Colorado State Senator Jessie Danielson would make you believe it's more likely that millions of companies are "bad actors" than that she just doesn't have the relevant experience in business to predict which way her bill was going to work out. Now that she's cost so many of her constituents lucrative remote jobs, it's too late to admit Mea Culpa, and instead it's everyone else's fault. If she was held a bit more accountable, the next time someone tries to bridge the gender pay gap they will hopefully spend some time interviewing and learning from people who have the relevant experience in hiring.

It really still isn't the norm anywhere to list compensation and I suspect that Y Combinator has the same problems of disparate compensation based on when people joined as any other company. Heck, we are all switching jobs constantly because the new guy got more than we did, despite being the same level and having more experience at the company.

Plenty of companies decided to stop hiring from Colorado rather than post compensation in the job postings.

If I had to guess, I suspect it provides no competitive advantage to list compensation except if you pay top tier.

As an anecdote from a friend, the wage differences can be substantial. The friend just recently got a new job and the senior who mentored him in onboarding also got promoted a level too. That senior was talking about how they finally reached six figures (Canada has much lower pay than the USA, so this isn't crazy). My friend made six figures starting, with 3-5 fewer years of experience and just about two years overall.

There are a lot of absurdly underpaid people out there.

I tried to start a trend a few months ago on the month Who's hiring posts to get posters to put the compensation. I automatically upvote any post with compensation, but few have it.

I even posted about it once and got a ton of upvotes but then the mods buried my post.

I would love to see more job posts with compensation in fairness to people who aren't good at negotiating, but it just isn't the norm these days.

I'm not sure why so many in this thread are so quick to condemn Colorado for this... sure, tech pay has come a long way in the past few years, but it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't very good and there were lawsuits over collusion among the industry's biggest players to keep comp down. Outside FAANG for that matter, overall comp still drops off pretty sharply. Anything that improves on the problem of asynchronous information would seem to be a good thing, and in an environment where there is theoretically a labor shortage one would think companies would be glad to share this information in order to help them attract talent.

I got to a point in my career where this was one of the first conversations - either when I was hiring or had someone reach out to see if I wanted a new gig. It wastes everyone's time if we're not in the same approximate range. At many companies, it really isn't a surprise anyway - sure maybe you are coming from far away and need some relocation help and I'm remote and don't need that, but we both get the same vesting schedule, etc. Frankly, if a company is coy about the approximate structure of their comp packages all it really does is tell me that they see me as expendable. Why would I want to go someplace where we are trying to screw each other over from the very beginning of the relationship?

Startup hiring is nothing like big company hiring. You’re basically casting a wide net and negotiating compensation on an individual basis. You may get a great junior applicant with 1 year of experience and a great senior tech lead with 15 years of FAANG experience respond to the same post, and you may want to hire them both!

If a company is flexible on compensation then it doesn’t make sense to artificially constrain the job listing before they even know what candidates are applying and how much they need to join.

Source: Previously a hiring manager at early startups.

To add to what I think have been many other good comments, in my experience the productivity differentials between individuals in the same job can easily be vastly greater than the upper and lower bounds of that job's payscale.

I can recount cases where I've worked with relatively new engineers (a couple years out of college) who were easily 3-4x as productive as some of their peers. Of course, the pay scale for "Software Engineer" usually only has a band width of about 15-20%. Yes, the better programmer would get promoted faster, but still I've nearly always seen that there is more variance in "creative"-type jobs than pay scales will allow.

So for these types of jobs, posting a payscale is nearly always a bad idea, because it can further compress what is already a "too compressed" payscale.

The dirty secret here is that well-funded early stage startups usually want to pay candidates as little as they're willing to accept, and not a cent more, though that doesn't mean they're not willing/able to compete with FAANG-level comp for a really good candidate (we're talking about the well funded ones, remember?). So usually early stage hires end up having a wildly varying range of offers depending on factors like experience, previous comp, negotiation skills, etc.

They can't discriminate on comp very effectively if they stated their ranges up front, and if they were truthful about it, it would look ridiculous enough that it wouldn't be useful to anybody anyways (think ranges like 100k-500k).

Source: I was burnt by this (fell on the very low end of the range) and later learned about it when I got a 50%+ raise when the company matured and implemented comp bands.

It's not in their interests as investors and owners to decrease information asymmetry in hiring. Maintaining that asymmetry allows for greater opportunities to profit.

I'm not affiliated with YC, but people are not commodities - one person might be a $50,000/yr X, and another person might be a $200,000/yr X. You don't know what kind of person you have until you talk with them.

For anything in NYC, they will need to as a new law takes effect.

https://www.dwt.com/blogs/employment-labor-and-benefits/2021...

They don't want dang to know how underpaid he is? (totally made this up)

I worked as a contractor where the day rates are stated up front. I wouldn't waste anyones time with a contract where the rate wasn't clearly specified.

there is a greater movement towards open salary policy, i started my job board[0] back in 2018 with this same premise.

Since then, I did not go through one interview without knowing salary band before-hand. Exception made for FAANGs which work on their own terms. Hopefully once the industry start moving into that direction everyone will conform. I think will happen sooner or later due to the very vocal minority[1] in play.

[0] https://golang.cafe

[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Most businesses only seem to when required. California only requires an employer to provide pay scale (salary or hourly wage, not bonuses or equity) upon request after an initial interview. Colorado requires wage/salary in job listings now. NYC will require a salary range in job postings starting in April 2022 for permanent positions (provided the new mayor doesn't veto it after taking office on Jan 1).

Because for fully remote worldwide jobs, it doesn’t always make sense to pay everyone San Francisco salaries.

E.g. GitLab, a 100% remote company with 1,400+ employees pays local rates, and here’s why: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...

Calling YC employees, submit your data anonymously at https://levels.fyi/addcomp.html so folks can see!

Why give away their power to negotiate?

The experience range for that position is so wide that the pay range won't be very meaningful.

I've been using this tool to benchmark startup and equity: https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/

Listing salary ranges in job postings will solve inequity issues as well as skipping Starbucks will solve one's savings issue.

Most companies want highest effort for lowest salary, most employees seek highest salary for acceptable effort. This is just the logic of the market, and affects every entity, regardless how ethical they otherwise are. Not following this you are easily outcompeted on both ends.

There are some leveraging efforts, but I see them as vainty projects, often enabled by the fact the company/employee is already successful. As long as it remains, capitalism dictates some basic rules - it does not make every participant automatically a greedy bastard.

Because the compensation is multi millions. They don’t need to.

A 0.01% share of YC is still worth a lot. And I’m assuming that all YC positions come with a share of equity.

Even if they didn’t, you get to help shape the admissions process. Which means you get the opportunity to participate in investment decisions for the startups that will in ten years be worth billions.

EDIT: Do people feel this is mistaken? I’d be happy to source the claims.

Startups don't do banding.

Because they want to extract as much as value as possible from their employees while paying as low as possible, and listing compensation is against that. In this I am with Žižek.Capitalism is a religious movement, not an economic one. Many people find perfectly rational for any company to this, but find highly offensive if a person decides to work as less as possible while still getting paid.

Because if they don't, they can shave dollars and keep them for themselves?

Just assume they’re lowballing and move on.

Probably because they have a range they are willing to pay depending on what value the candidate can be assumed to bring to the team.

I'd do this job for free if I could afford it. What a fantastic opportunity.

> HN, being a rather progressive forum

HN, as in the site ran by a cutthroat venture capitalist firm... and you describe that as progressive?

This is the same VC that funded and financially enabled LendUP, which according to CFPB, was quoted saying "We are shuttering the lending operations of this fintech for repeatedly lying and illegally cheating its customers". https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-shutt...

No. A union is progressive. A worker cooperative ala Mondragon is progressive. These are corporate capitalists doing venture capitalist-y things.

I won't even apply to jobs if there's not a range somewhere (ad, glassdoor, levels.fyi).

From the guidelines:

> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No insider anything, but personally, I think posting salaries is a bad idea, so if I went to a company that posted salaries, I would know for sure I wasn't making a fair deal as it is a ploy to reduce my bargaining leverage as a candidate. It also allows for collusion to drive salaries down between companies, and on the other side, it exclusively enables leverage for people who don't negotiate, but in fact bully with histrionic public accusations of unfairness instead of making a case for what their skills are worth. If you reward that, you only get more of it.

I would recommend resisting every and all suggestions that companies should post salary levels for jobs, don't be fooled, it's just a trap.