> They aim to beat what someone else will pay for your skills, as long as they want you working there.
So what happened in 2020-2022 where everyone was willing to pay more and more for the same skill sets?
I think we're agreeing on the same thing here, I am saying they will never pay $700k now, but they probably have someone at that comp level, so they have to list that in the range.
That looks like, essentially, the decision not to tie skill levels to job titles. Which is legitimate I guess.
But the company needs to fill particular niches, right? So if their philosophy doesn’t allow them to advertise for more or less experienced coders, it seems like they are signing themselves up for a more difficult filtering problem?
I guess that’s why they are unusual. If this sort of thing became really widespread, it would be easy to write a law with more onerous reporting requirements. Maybe we should require a distribution of salaries for that role, for example.
It's not absurd, it's an actual range. I don't know about Netflix specifically, but I think it works that way: They know you resume, and how well you did at the interview. Based on that, they'll make you an offer which you can negotiate only slightly. It's also better to have a competing offer.
Conversely, you should have some idea of how much you're worth and where you fit in that $100-$700K range.
Don't apply. The employer is showing you how they operate when they're trying to impress candidates. Do you really want to find out what they do when they know your best alternative is a job search?
>How is someone supposed to reasonably negotiate that role?
Get a competing job offer.
A minimum price lets labor sellers know if it is worth applying or not, and trends in supply and demand for that type of labor (based on which way the minimums are moving industry wide).
Competing job offers and other interviews lined up are excellent, excellent, excellent to have!
For this reason always try to cluster job interviews together as much as possible so that the offers come out around the same time. This situation is generally going to be very favorable for you as an engineer!
Consider that some hiring manager probably has been played games with for months in terms of head count and interviewing poor candidate after another. When they extend that offer to you, they want you seated yesterday. Mentioning "I have 2 offers, I've had 100% offers for every interview so far, and btw I'm interviewing at a FAANG tomorrow." - that will perk up some interest and can elicit a pro-active better offer.
I've had one outfit ask me, "How much for you to just stop interviewing and come work for us?" This sense of urgency on the employer side is the only time where an engineering employee has more power than the company. Most employers will try everything to make this window of time short - usually by trying to get you to stop interviewing and do no salary negotiation, or give you an exploding offer, or counter and say there are competing candidates.
There is a 0% chance that I'd put in the effort to get an offer from a company just to set my price with a company I'd like to work for. No company is worth that headache.
If I happen to already have a competing offer, sure. But when job searching I'm not carpet bombing resumes, I'm targeting specific companies that I think would be a match.
or “unethically” (depending on your ethics!), you could just _say_ you have a competing offer. Unless there is like some secret hiring manager slack where people ask each other “did you really send that person an offer?”.
Honestly after sometimes weeks long latencies waiting on “proceeding to the next step”, ludicrous leetcode exercises and design Twitter, or worse - their business - from scratch on this here virtual whiteboard, I’m so buggered I’m gonna take the first number out of their mouths.
Earlier this year I read some commentary about how those wild salary ranges are in part a response to California's Pay Transparency Act -- basically, give a gigantic and irrelevant range to satisfy the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.
The median range is somewhere around 40%, that is the max is 40% or so above the min. That’s based on my analysis of over 5 million job postings with salary ranges in them. A subset here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j0Xap2Qt1bzY-8OA1Gqk.... Which is around what most salary ranges for a specific job grade have [1]
That’s my data, which you requested, so yes, there are absurd ones, but it’s not the vast majority by far. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water based on one outlier you just found
Every one of these comments so far are from people that have no idea how much Netflix pays. $600k-700k for a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix is about expected. Also keep in mind, they pay all cash, so this isn't a "Total Compensation" number. I have a friend who made over $1 million cash at Netflix per year. Their philosophy is to pay top of market for the best talent.
A big range like that means you should feel more than fine selecting the average— so $400k— at the minimum. Anything less and you’re essentially admitting you don’t think you’re worth what the salary range is.
Personally I would ask for clarification, and if they refuse to provide any, ask for near or above the top-end of the range. Theres plenty of $215k salary jobs currently, so if you happen to not land this one, then no loss of what you never had. But if you happen to get this job, making $700k, simply for asking, then congrats!
Most people don't know what a $400k Security Engineer actually does to warrant that pay because you can probably find a similar job at another company that pays much less and probably makes you work more. I sure as fuck don't and I at least have one pentesting cert FWIW.
This pricing scheme punishes people trying to be honest about their skill set. Otherwise why stop at the average? Just max it out and ask for $700k. Another $300k/yr won't break Netflix's bank and everyone else is getting rich that they won't care to call you out either.
The issue is that if you're currently making $200K, it's hard to tell where they might think you might sit in that scale up-front.
It's a bit like saying "Employee - $10K-$10M p/a" - It's not very useful in a job posting, as you might reasonably assume someone being paid the top salary is not actually doing the same role as at the bottom range.
> A big range like that means you should feel more than fine selecting the average— so $400k— at the minimum. Anything less and you’re essentially admitting you don’t think you’re worth what the salary range is.
But does this mean that no one who is "worth what the salary range is" should be paid in the bottom half of the range?
That’s what I’ve seen as well, it’s always a range with a huuuuuge gap. No one is posting the actual expected salary. It’s almost a scam, I could post a job listing with a salary of “$0 to $1,000,000,000.00”. It’s the same as not posting a salary number at all
The median range is somewhere around 40%, that is the max is 40% or so above the min. That’s based on my analysis of over 5 million job postings with salary ranges in them. A subset here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j0Xap2Qt1bzY-8OA1Gqk.... Which is around what most salary ranges for a specific job grade have [1]
That’s my data, not my gut. So yes, there are absurd ones, but it’s not the vast majority by far. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water based on some outliers
> How is someone supposed to reasonably negotiate that role? $100k is clearly a joke, $700k is clearly a salary someone got during the bubble.
Netflix does actually compensate within this range, though.
The alternatives to these wide ranges are:
1. Create a lot of different postings with different ranges. This is how companies end up with Junior Engineer, Engineer, Senior Engineer, Staff Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer and other titles for what might be the same headcount. If someone comes in with skills and compensation expectations that don’t match the job they applied for, they get bumped to a different job listing. Nothing actually changes, but now the salary ranges are narrower in the job postings.
2. Give everyone similar base compensation and make the difference up in bonuses and RSUs, which aren’t posted in the job listings. These listings usually have lower compensation listed to signal the candidate that RSUs are going to be significant. For example, you’ll see Meta posting jobs with comp down to $129K even though everyone knows they’re going to get more RSUs than base comp. I’ve seen more companies claim to pay everyone the same, with the fine print being that equity grants can vary greatly from person to person.
Really though, I think highly compensated devs need to acknowledge that this law wasn’t made for them. It was made for the people applying to jobs where they don’t know if the typical compensation is $18/hr or $30/hr, or people who have been earning $45K for years who haven’t realized that their peers are getting $60K.
When someone is applying to $450K jobs at Netflix, they have numerous resources from levels.fyi to Blind that will reveal far more than a number on a job listing will. The law is not for highly compensated SWEs applying to the top 0.1% of jobs.
> How is someone supposed to reasonably negotiate that role?
I don't think I fully understand this question. When I apply for a position, I already know what my minimum salary requirement is, and I negotiate based on that. Any published salary range doesn't affect that, except that if my minimum is above their maximum, then I know not to bother applying.
> How is someone supposed to reasonably negotiate that role? $100k is clearly a joke, $700k is clearly a salary someone got during the bubble.
$100K is easily a junior salary. $700K is a Principal plus salary in "big tech". A huge portion of that is RSU's and there may be weight thrown into personal performance with certain goals that align to company objectives. There are certain SRE jobs that are designed this way, especially if you're on the policy or proactive software development side of SRE work where the products you build (policy or software) take time to build and have huge associated returns in terms of monetary and customer trust.
I don't think that's absurd. That's a realistic enough salary band for getting hired at Netflix across all levels (https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...). It's not like those job listings that put "$0-$1000000 a year" in the salary range just to check the box.
For that role it's most likely, they're hiring multiple security engineers and will level based on experience - most people they hire will probably make $200k-$350k. But the right person (10+ YoE in Security, relevant experience at competing streaming companies, strong interview performance) could definitely negotiate themselves to the top end of that range.
Does Netflix do location based pay? Could explain that.
Not that I necessarily agree with location based pay scales. I haven’t really thought about this idea tbh. On one hand, a company can get location based pay scales simply by having an office in a different area. On the other, if you’re hired in San Fran and working remotely in (some much cheaper to live place) then it’s not really the same. Obviously, the state is benefiting much less from this scenario.
I just applied for an engineer position that listed it’s salary range as $130k-$190k - and part of the application process asked for a salary range, to which I replied $130k-$190k - what’s the point of that? Just say “this position starts at $130k” and let the details get worked out during the hiring process.
These are just your assumptions, but I aggree. However, when I see job posts with ranges like these, I just avoid the company, since it shows me that the company is:
-lowballing employees
-not transparent (i.e., posting nonsense salary ranges just to tick off the requirement)
In context, yes. For a senior engineering role at one of humanity's biggest richest companies in a very HCOL location, $100k is ludicrously low.
Now, I agree that pay ranges across our economy are completely out of touch with reason, but in this context it would be downright stupid to take $100k for that role when non-FAANG could pay you more.
This is an often proffered limitation of these laws, but there are second order effects. If someone hires a woman, minority, whatever else, at the $100k rate with the same qualifications they typically hire X group at the $700k rate, they're going to have some 'splainin' to do.
The scariest thing about the salary transparency laws is that it makes it blindingly obvious that companies do not regularly follow the law. Adherence is both very public and easy, but imagine all the other laws being broken all the time that aren't as trivial to comply with.
Perhaps you could also use such a list to seek damages in states where the law allows for it (Washington state [1]) and provide the list to states where damages are not provided to encourage lawmakers to make the policy more robust.
> If a company violates the new requirement [2], “a job applicant or an employee” is entitled to remedies, according to a state Legislature website. Those remedies could include up to $5,000 in compensation [3].
I'm simultaneously shocked to see it's that low in states that require it. I suppose I shouldn't be — no law is obeyed 100% afterall — but I would have expected higher than 60%. This makes me think there needs to be higher penalties for failing to follow it.
This is a strange American thing. As a Brit it is utterly bizarre and
alien to me. Nobody here would ever look twice at a job that didn't
state the salary. If you're trying to fill a position the salary is
probably the most important piece of information you need to sell
it. How can an employment market even function otherwise?
> As a Brit it is utterly bizarre and alien to me.
I’m really surprised you say that. 90% of the jobs I look at for ‘software developer’ do not state salary. I have seen a couple with a ‘salary range’ but most don’t mention it or say “dependent on experience”.
I’ve been working in software for 15 years now in the UK and that’s always been my experience. Even though it’s standard, I still don’t see it as normal that such a vital piece of information is always missing.
Without explicit salary ranges, the market functions through implicit cultural expectations about what an appropriate salary should be. Which of course has a lot of problems. For example, US software engineering salaries are stereotypically bimodal, and one of the staples of our mid 2010s job market discourse was people who'd only seen one hump insisting that the other can't possibly exist. (The question of whether there's actually two humps or just a wide range, I don't know if I've ever seen resolved.)
This one makes sense, providing local British context. I think it is helpful here.
But usually it seems like they are used to claim superiority. "As a <identity politics tribe member>, this is why my perspective is more important than yours and you are wrong."
this is absolutely welcome. yeah a wide range is still better than nothing.
it's actually very simple, surprisingly many job posts still miss them:
* location, remote or relocation or hybrid
* pay range
* job description
this saves both sides' time in the end.
I also like the 'simple apply' and in fact I only apply for those jobs, i.e. just send out resume, instead of filling out lots of personal info. if the employer needs that, please parse the resume yourself with a script.
The number of jobs I've seen that have absolutely no mention of whether they are remote, hybrid, or on-site is astounding. I'm not wasting my time applying for something 1200 miles away just to find out that they want a 2/3 hybrid setup. Realistically I'd never find out because they'll see my address and never contact me.
Or remote with a country or timezone restriction. There's lots of US companies that just say "remote" but forget to mention that the candidate must be a US resident, or work within X timezones, etc. Contrast to worldwide remote companies, which really do hire in all timezones.
The default is and has always been that employees will come into the office, I don't know why you'd expect this to be specifically disclosed. If it doesn't say remote it's almost surely not remote.
Most job boards I've seem correctly parse salary ranges buried in job descriptions about 75% of the time.
Also, this is just one job board; in all my time using internet career websites, I have never even heard of directly apply, so the headline seems a bit sensational in terms of what's being claimed.
As someone in tech looking for a role, I agree, though there is some utility for big tech companies where compensation data is available elsewhere. By looking at the upper bound of the salary, I can reasonably infer the level of the role. For example, level 6 SWE roles at Meta show an upper bound of $241k and level 7 SWE roles show $289 (or thereabouts, IIRC).
It's still of limited utility though, since one has to still use an external source to identify bonus percentage and possible range of equity values.
At the least, they are helpful for people who are not “in the know” for which types of labor are selling for the highest prices.
Maybe non native language speakers, immigrants, the immigrants’ kids, etc. more transparency in labor prices is helpful to at least the people earning less than the highest earners to show them where they can earn more.
Readit News
Recently saw a Senior Security Engineer role for Netflix, $100-$700k salary range.
How is someone supposed to reasonably negotiate that role? $100k is clearly a joke, $700k is clearly a salary someone got during the bubble.
Do I come in at $400k? Is $250k a bargain rate?
https://imgur.com/a/0Fe00Qf
Research a bit about Netflix's comp philosophy and this will make more sense.
It's not bubble compensation. They aim to beat what someone else will pay for your skills, as long as they want you working there.
Until recently, they also only hired at a single IC level so the range was probably narrower.
So what happened in 2020-2022 where everyone was willing to pay more and more for the same skill sets?
I think we're agreeing on the same thing here, I am saying they will never pay $700k now, but they probably have someone at that comp level, so they have to list that in the range.
But the company needs to fill particular niches, right? So if their philosophy doesn’t allow them to advertise for more or less experienced coders, it seems like they are signing themselves up for a more difficult filtering problem?
I guess that’s why they are unusual. If this sort of thing became really widespread, it would be easy to write a law with more onerous reporting requirements. Maybe we should require a distribution of salaries for that role, for example.
Conversely, you should have some idea of how much you're worth and where you fit in that $100-$700K range.
Get a competing job offer.
A minimum price lets labor sellers know if it is worth applying or not, and trends in supply and demand for that type of labor (based on which way the minimums are moving industry wide).
For this reason always try to cluster job interviews together as much as possible so that the offers come out around the same time. This situation is generally going to be very favorable for you as an engineer!
Consider that some hiring manager probably has been played games with for months in terms of head count and interviewing poor candidate after another. When they extend that offer to you, they want you seated yesterday. Mentioning "I have 2 offers, I've had 100% offers for every interview so far, and btw I'm interviewing at a FAANG tomorrow." - that will perk up some interest and can elicit a pro-active better offer.
I've had one outfit ask me, "How much for you to just stop interviewing and come work for us?" This sense of urgency on the employer side is the only time where an engineering employee has more power than the company. Most employers will try everything to make this window of time short - usually by trying to get you to stop interviewing and do no salary negotiation, or give you an exploding offer, or counter and say there are competing candidates.
If I happen to already have a competing offer, sure. But when job searching I'm not carpet bombing resumes, I'm targeting specific companies that I think would be a match.
No clue if there's any truth to that though.
https://californiapayroll.com/blog/sb-1162-california-pay-tr...
That’s my data, which you requested, so yes, there are absurd ones, but it’s not the vast majority by far. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water based on one outlier you just found
[1] https://www.aihr.com/hr-glossary/range-spread/#:~:text=A%20g....
Personally I would ask for clarification, and if they refuse to provide any, ask for near or above the top-end of the range. Theres plenty of $215k salary jobs currently, so if you happen to not land this one, then no loss of what you never had. But if you happen to get this job, making $700k, simply for asking, then congrats!
This pricing scheme punishes people trying to be honest about their skill set. Otherwise why stop at the average? Just max it out and ask for $700k. Another $300k/yr won't break Netflix's bank and everyone else is getting rich that they won't care to call you out either.
It's a bit like saying "Employee - $10K-$10M p/a" - It's not very useful in a job posting, as you might reasonably assume someone being paid the top salary is not actually doing the same role as at the bottom range.
But does this mean that no one who is "worth what the salary range is" should be paid in the bottom half of the range?
That’s my data, not my gut. So yes, there are absurd ones, but it’s not the vast majority by far. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water based on some outliers
[1] https://www.aihr.com/hr-glossary/range-spread/#:~:text=A%20g....
Netflix does actually compensate within this range, though.
The alternatives to these wide ranges are:
1. Create a lot of different postings with different ranges. This is how companies end up with Junior Engineer, Engineer, Senior Engineer, Staff Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer and other titles for what might be the same headcount. If someone comes in with skills and compensation expectations that don’t match the job they applied for, they get bumped to a different job listing. Nothing actually changes, but now the salary ranges are narrower in the job postings.
2. Give everyone similar base compensation and make the difference up in bonuses and RSUs, which aren’t posted in the job listings. These listings usually have lower compensation listed to signal the candidate that RSUs are going to be significant. For example, you’ll see Meta posting jobs with comp down to $129K even though everyone knows they’re going to get more RSUs than base comp. I’ve seen more companies claim to pay everyone the same, with the fine print being that equity grants can vary greatly from person to person.
Really though, I think highly compensated devs need to acknowledge that this law wasn’t made for them. It was made for the people applying to jobs where they don’t know if the typical compensation is $18/hr or $30/hr, or people who have been earning $45K for years who haven’t realized that their peers are getting $60K.
When someone is applying to $450K jobs at Netflix, they have numerous resources from levels.fyi to Blind that will reveal far more than a number on a job listing will. The law is not for highly compensated SWEs applying to the top 0.1% of jobs.
I don't think I fully understand this question. When I apply for a position, I already know what my minimum salary requirement is, and I negotiate based on that. Any published salary range doesn't affect that, except that if my minimum is above their maximum, then I know not to bother applying.
Ask for what you want.
If I'm making a salary I'm excited to earn, why do I care if I left money on the table? I'm happy!
If I'm happy, somebody else being a better negotiator than me doesn't make me unhappy.
If something in the future makes me unhappy about the salary I'm earning, then I'll address that in the future.
Salary range is what they can offer, but you should know your own value. If you think your time is worth $400k then ask $400k. It is simple as that.
At one point you should know what amount of money would drive you to get out of bed and do whatever client wants.
$100K is easily a junior salary. $700K is a Principal plus salary in "big tech". A huge portion of that is RSU's and there may be weight thrown into personal performance with certain goals that align to company objectives. There are certain SRE jobs that are designed this way, especially if you're on the policy or proactive software development side of SRE work where the products you build (policy or software) take time to build and have huge associated returns in terms of monetary and customer trust.
For reference, my first SRE job was $75k/year.
Given the specific level, the salary range is indeed absurd.
For that role it's most likely, they're hiring multiple security engineers and will level based on experience - most people they hire will probably make $200k-$350k. But the right person (10+ YoE in Security, relevant experience at competing streaming companies, strong interview performance) could definitely negotiate themselves to the top end of that range.
Not that I necessarily agree with location based pay scales. I haven’t really thought about this idea tbh. On one hand, a company can get location based pay scales simply by having an office in a different area. On the other, if you’re hired in San Fran and working remotely in (some much cheaper to live place) then it’s not really the same. Obviously, the state is benefiting much less from this scenario.
These are just your assumptions, but I aggree. However, when I see job posts with ranges like these, I just avoid the company, since it shows me that the company is: -lowballing employees -not transparent (i.e., posting nonsense salary ranges just to tick off the requirement)
White collar pay has gotten totally out of hand.
Now, I agree that pay ranges across our economy are completely out of touch with reason, but in this context it would be downright stupid to take $100k for that role when non-FAANG could pay you more.
> If a company violates the new requirement [2], “a job applicant or an employee” is entitled to remedies, according to a state Legislature website. Those remedies could include up to $5,000 in compensation [3].
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/months-after-wa-employ... ("Months after WA employers required to share pay info, a flood of lawsuits")
[2] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.58.110
[3] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.58.060
Deleted Comment
I'm simultaneously shocked to see it's that low in states that require it. I suppose I shouldn't be — no law is obeyed 100% afterall — but I would have expected higher than 60%. This makes me think there needs to be higher penalties for failing to follow it.
I’m really surprised you say that. 90% of the jobs I look at for ‘software developer’ do not state salary. I have seen a couple with a ‘salary range’ but most don’t mention it or say “dependent on experience”.
I’ve been working in software for 15 years now in the UK and that’s always been my experience. Even though it’s standard, I still don’t see it as normal that such a vital piece of information is always missing.
Without explicit salary ranges, the market functions through implicit cultural expectations about what an appropriate salary should be. Which of course has a lot of problems. For example, US software engineering salaries are stereotypically bimodal, and one of the staples of our mid 2010s job market discourse was people who'd only seen one hump insisting that the other can't possibly exist. (The question of whether there's actually two humps or just a wide range, I don't know if I've ever seen resolved.)
Employee desperation to have income and health insurance means it's worth going into the interviews blind.
But usually it seems like they are used to claim superiority. "As a <identity politics tribe member>, this is why my perspective is more important than yours and you are wrong."
it's actually very simple, surprisingly many job posts still miss them:
this saves both sides' time in the end.I also like the 'simple apply' and in fact I only apply for those jobs, i.e. just send out resume, instead of filling out lots of personal info. if the employer needs that, please parse the resume yourself with a script.
Most job boards I've seem correctly parse salary ranges buried in job descriptions about 75% of the time.
Also, this is just one job board; in all my time using internet career websites, I have never even heard of directly apply, so the headline seems a bit sensational in terms of what's being claimed.
It's still of limited utility though, since one has to still use an external source to identify bonus percentage and possible range of equity values.
Deleted Comment
Maybe non native language speakers, immigrants, the immigrants’ kids, etc. more transparency in labor prices is helpful to at least the people earning less than the highest earners to show them where they can earn more.