How many people who are considering hiring their first few employees have an idea of what the minimum they’d likely pay and the maximum they’d likely pay for those new positions? Almost all.

Now how many could even tell you the rough definition of standard deviation, let alone be able to give a value for it? Almost none.

As an applicant for a single opening, it’s not obvious that standard deviation is helpful either.

For normal people, I think that min and max are the two most practical and understandable measures.

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qurren 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> As an applicant for a single opening

You're nitpicking at details. I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to write it so that this isn't an issue, but it seems you're more interested in "taking the other side" rather than thinking together about how to increase job compensation transparency.

Here's the problem with minimums: Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K. Yes, I've seen them.

Here's a hint for everyone else: For small companies and single openings they can just aggregate mean/median/std by job level (E5 average, M1 average), or aggregate horizontally by team (HR average, ops average), whatever. Anything to increase transparency. If you're criticizing the math instead of building on the math, you're clearly against job transparency.

	▲	sokoloff 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’m in favor of transparency (and consistently argue for that and act accordingly inside my own company). I’m against adding information that will confuse far more people than it will help. A company listing $100k-$900k per year for a role that’s not commissioned sales is exhibiting malicious compliance and should be dealt with directly as such rather than adding an additional nearly useless measure to somehow help smoke that out or avoid it.
	▲	runako 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K. Yes, this is extremely Netflix. The "fix" for this is to mandate that they can no longer post an ad for engineers, but rather they have to post separate ads for each engineering role. Maybe this is better, maybe not. If a person applies to L4, are they allowed to be hired at L3 pay? Will that confuse people? > For small companies and single openings levels.fyi chooses not to publish some comp datapoints because there's too little data, which means publishing the data is tantamount to publishing an individual's compensation. I hear you on the goal, but the details are tough.

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master-lincoln 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

we need less normal people