alt Hacker NewsI'm just tired of regulators realizing the right things to regulate but not implementing them correctly.
Job postings must include a salary range? Who the fuck thought of that? Did they even ask a mathematician whether providing the min() and max() would be useful rather than mean(), median(), and std(), which is what the law really should require?
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For many tech jobs, that still wouldn’t help much. Salary alone is often half or less of total compensation. They’d also need to include stock grants and bonuses for the comparison to be meaningful.
Caveat: I am pro more transparency in compensation data. But it's hard to do right.
> mean(), median(), and std()
play this out a bit, and you'll quickly realize that there are infinite ways to game this. Something like levels.fyi only works because levels are a thing, and they are consistent across a relative handful of companies (most tech workers do not work at those companies).
And even levels.fyi won't publish salary data until there are enough data points at a company to prevent such publication from inadvertently publishing how much an individual person makes. This makes it less useful for (say) a senior looking for a job at a non-tech or small firm.
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.