Given that candidates are justifiably wary of naming a number first, if you don't want to waste your time, it behooves you to name your range first.

I fully agree. At the time my assumption was that candidates had a pretty good idea what a 'normal' salary range is for a position. I was wrong.

And my experience is that never, ever, has a potential employer expressed a "pretty good idea" about what a "normal" salary for a position is.

That's a bit strange.

It's like buying milk. I couldn't tell you exactly how much I could buy a gallon of milk for right now (without looking it up). But I could tell you that it is for around five or six dollars. I could also tell you that organic milk is a bit more and the store brand is a bit less. I could also tell you it is likely to be a bit more in a small, boutique store than a large chain store and cost a bit more in the middle of NYC or SF than it would cost in the outskirts of St. Louis.

In short, I know enough about the cost of milk that if it is priced at $16 a gallon or $1.50 a gallon that it is unusual and, despite not knowing the exact 'normal' cost of a gallon of milk, that I can assume I can walk away and get some somewhere else in the market for a 'normal' price.

I think most people are in my shoes when it comes to milk and I think most employers in tech have a pretty good idea what a normal salary for a position is, especially those who have written checks for those positions for a while.

If you are finding that is not the case, I would wonder why.

Alas, software developers are not an agricultural commodity with a highly transparent and uniform underlying cost structure. :-)

The "10X developer" may be a bit of overhyped mythology, but underneath it is the very real idea that developers vary enormously in their abilities and the amount of value they can add. While the variance in their salaries doesn't capture the variance in their productivity, perhaps, there are many situations where there is profound business sense in paying one developer 2-3x more than another.

The problems are: (1) Everyone thinks they're that 2-3x guy; (2) office politics would sooner or later lead to the news getting out and a profound sense of injustice spreading like a wildfire.

You'd be amazed by how vast the range for developer salaries is.

I've had employers think that $80k was a reasonable offer for me (when I was making $200k).

It definitely depends on the sector and situation. If someone told me that a dev that some would offer $80K was making $200K I'd say 'Oh. In the financial sector?'

Otherwise, what I'm talking about is the fat part of the salary curve...there are always going to be interesting situations at the edge.

I've never worked in the financial sector. The truth is that there's just vast differentiation in how companies treat and pay developers. Some companies basically don't recognize the need for quality and pay all their technical folks <$120k across the board.

I think it is less about recognizing the need for quality and more about not needing nor being able to afford those skills.

It's like mechanics: F1 mechanics make a hell of a lot more than your average wrench turner (for good reason). If you need someone to look at your Corolla you don't need that extra skill and you couldn't afford it even if you wanted it.

You're assuming management competence (ie. that they know what they need).

I've seen way too many companies where they have 3 or 4 developers doing work which 1 competent developer could do, but they're unable to hire or retain competent developers due to poor pay. They'd actually save a lot of money by paying better.

...where are you buying milk? $2.59/gallon here in the Boston metro.

Organic brand from a small milk boutique in Manhattan, apparently.

The difference is most people are in the market for hood and I see myself as the local brand organic fair trade vanilla soy milk. No one wants to be hood.

I am also often similarly loathe to apply to positions without posted salary ranges. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's often "taboo" to bring up pay early-on in the discussions. But on the flip side, I've found that people who don't like to talk about pay usually don't want to pay much either, so it almost is a self-selection criterion that has worked really well in the past.

But I really like that you approach it this way - practical, sensible, and acknowledges that both parties' time has value.

Companies should name their range first mate, or just interview and accept the fact that the job hunt sucks for everyone. Why do you think external recruiters exist? They work as middleman that have intimate knowledge of a company's range, as well as their candidates' range, without either party knowing. That allows them to find helpful matches without wasting either party's time... at a 20% markup of course ;)

> They work as middleman that have intimate knowledge of a company's range, as well as their candidates' range, without either party knowing.

That's comically naive. External recruiters routinely share candidate ranges with employers.

They also routinely share the employers range with candidates.

Believe me, if I told an external recruiter I was looking to make X and they sent me on an interview and I got a job offer at 0.5X, not only would that be the last time we ever spoke but wherever I eventually landed would not be using that recruiter or their firm ever again.

I can't think of a job I've been contacted about in the last 15+ years where I didn't know what the salary range was before I even agreed to have my resume submitted.

If it's such a big deal to employers, and they don't want to waste their time, why don't they name a number first?

I won't object.

I didn't at the time. I do now.

Problem is, is every potential employee worth the same to you?

Of course not. But every role has a range, more or less, which is a balance of the value that role creates vs the alternatives in the market. The range is due to factors such as the risk an individual embodies based on previous experience, demonstrable skill, references along with likely ramp up time based on those factors.

To take a silly but illustrative example: if I'm looking for a javascript developer, I don't care if the person I'm interviewing also has a law degree from a top tier school and can craft airtight patent applications even if I may have some use for that skill. I am hiring for a javascript developer. That is the role I need filled. I will offer a salary range based on that need.

It is a silly example but I see the issue so often: someone will apply for a role and then expect to be compensated for their other skills. While, sometimes, it may be worth it to do a bit of management gymnastics and get someone brilliant through the door and find out how to fully leverage their talents later, most of the time that's just wishful thinking on everyone's part.

Hit thread limit, but I'm asking about @clavalle's ranges here:

How often does your eventual accepted offer land at the high end of your offered range? How often at the low end?

I ask, because it often seems unproductive to negotiate within-range on merits. If you're willing to pay up to X, I as a candidate am going to expect that amount. Anything less is letting you, the employer, capture the surplus...

Replying to @clavalle... Thanks for the thoughtful reply - I appreciate the chance to engage on this!

I understand the concept of probabilistic valuation of risks/opportunities of a given candidate, and if that were practically quantifiable in the real world, I agree that it would represent a sound way to price an offer (provided you also factored in the cost of losing a candidate and having to put more resources towards finding an equivalent or better candidate)... [1]

Unfortunately, in practice, a candidate has to be evaluated more coarsely as "good enough to hire" or "not good enough to hire". There's no way you could in good conscience employ someone who couldn't do the work - even if they came at a discount. That means that there definitely is budget surplus any time you hire someone at less than your maximum budget. There is a fixed amount you're able to pay to get the work done, and that is at the max of your budget range.

Strategically, then, the max of the range offered represents the minimum a qualified candidate should target in a negotiation... Your mileage may vary, of course, with the skill of the negotiator.

[1] By the way, I highly recommend Algorithms to Live By for an interesting discussion around the use of such methods in practice.

> There's no way you could in good conscience employ someone who couldn't do the work

Oh, if it was only so simple as 'can do the work' | 'cannot do the work'!

It is, of course, a very course and rough estimate but it is more like 'This person is likely to be great! They will not only do the work but surprise and delight me and pull our organization forward more solidly and quickly then we even hoped. We are lucky they happened to be looking just at the time we need their skills!' or 'This person looks like a good candidate but they tend to jump jobs on a yearly basis and has experience in C# rather than Java much less Scala but we've been looking for a while and we really need to get started and they seem smart enough to get up to speed.'

Point is, it's a complicated process with complicated factors.

Also, there is the wider market to consider. If I don't think a candidate can go out and get another job for the same price or more, I am unlikely to offer a premium on top of that market price.

So I have to disagree; skilled jobs are not binary in nature -- the max of the range offered represents how much a top tier candidate that fits well with the position should target. For those others without the same risk/reward profile or market power, they will have to keep from overselling themselves and take those factors into account.

If you like Algorithms to Live By, I think you'd enjoy 'How to Measure Anything' which really gets into the nitty gritty of how to reduce uncertainty and how even modest reductions can lead to much more solid decisions with these kinds of inherently fuzzy and complex problems.

You assume there is a surplus.

If I tell you at the beginning of our conversation 'The salary for this position is between $80K and $120K depending on your experience, education, and demonstrable skill etc'...

Throughout the course of our interview it is revealed that your education is a good fit for the position and your experience, while decent and potentially transferrable, is not a great fit for the position. Also, the technical part of the interview was good in some areas and poor in others (though I suspect through mere ignorance and not raw ability) and you have no public code under your belt that I can examine. But, you seem to communicate well and get along with the team.

Well, you are a good candidate but represent a significant risk relative to some other candidates. I could hire you and it turn out that those skills are not as transferrable as I'd hoped. You could take significantly more training than I was expecting for the role which is a cost to me.

The 'surplus' goes toward the expected cost of the risk. It is possible that you could find a better fit employment wise and that I could find a better fit employee wise but that carries its own risk. We both weigh all of that call it good and are happy how it turns out. Or we don't and the search continues.

When you tell employees your number so as not to waste time, do you name the number at the top of the range or at the bottom?

Both. And I try to give them a rough idea of the things that factor into pushing one into the higher end of the range or lower end.

> I ask for a range right off and give one in return.

I wish more employers were willing to do that. Many that I've talked to want the candidate to state their salary expectation, but aren't willing to say what range they are looking to pay.

Well, it wasn't a waste of time if you gained some experience, which I think was the point. As a manager I've made tons of mistakes. Much of my management style today is based on "Well, I won't do that again." Every mistake I've made has made me a better manager.