HACKER Q&A
📣 janalsncm

What about a job site that showed bid/ask spread for wages?


Maybe this is a dumb idea, but I think it would be interesting, if only as an experiment. Workers can have a hard time finding work, and employers have a hard time finding employees. Maybe full transparency can shine a light on what’s really happening.

The idea is, show the bid/ask spread for time. Workers are selling time, companies are buying it. Of course, broad categories of jobs will be separated from each other.

A bid ask spread looks like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bid%E2%80%93ask_spread

There are a few complications: 1. Employers don’t want to share their bid. Well, the law might require them to.

2. Workers might have variable ask. Fair, since it matters if they have to commute and what the role is exactly. That can potentially be countered with a formula. (I’m willing to commute X minutes for Y more dollars per hour, I’m willing to relocate for Z more dollars where Z could be infinity, etc)

3. Jobs are variable and people are variable so time is hard to price. This is true but maybe a close match is good enough to merit an interview.


  👤 mdcds Accepted Answer ✓
People and jobs are non-fungible: no two candidates are identical, no two jobs are the same.

Bid/ask spreads make sense to me only in situations when fungible units of A are traded for fungible units of B.


👤 simne
This could be interest exercise, but is not main issue for industry.

Few years ago, I've spent large amount of time, to figure out, why there are so few good films.

Findings shocked me. So simple, but impossible to fix. Just people are unreliable, in sense, You could have best crew, enough budget, best etc, but still deliver something average. And people are most unreliable part of formula. This is not intentionally, just too sophisticated model, accepts too many outcomes, and many leads to fail.


👤 vivegi
How is this different than an employer providing a payscale range for the position (as mandated for job postings by some jurisdictions)?

👤 b20000
interesting but the main issue is that most engineering people undervalue skills and don’t negotiate. they don’t know the true value of their skills. so the question is how this order book and market can help with price discovery such that the historically poor pricing of skills is improved upon.

👤 quickthrower2
upwork.com for full timers?

👤 skibidibipiti
Levels.fyi and teamblind.com