Ask HN: What up with these startup salaries?
Throwaway for obvious reasons, though you might figure out who I am if you know me personally.<p>For early stage startups, I was being told 100k + 1% was standard in NYC. This was by several places, or you could just go look at AngelList where they often explicitly list it.<p>I ended up getting rejected by tons of NYC late-stage startups (Percolate, Recombine, Betterment, YCharts, Digital Ocean, SquareSpace, Airtime), and I'm 90% sure that compensation expectations were a big reason, since I usually got past the tech screen but things broke down once we started talking compensation. I also got knocked out by some tech screens because they are crapshoots, and when I do 15 code screens I'm bound to make a few mistakes.<p>The market is in a weird spot, tons of companies desperately want engineers but they are freaked out by how fast salaries are climbing. They really don't want to go into bidding wars over people, and they really don't want to give new hires more then current hires and then be forced to give their entire engineering staff raises. Based on some conversations, I think they actually expect salaries to go back down but I think they are delusional, I hear an incredible amount of companies that are planning on ramping up hiring. Now granted if I could reliably predict macroeconomic trends I wouldn't need to work for someone else, so I'm just guessing. I do think there might be an "app"/"big data" bubble but there are so many traditional businesses ramping up on software hiring for things like ecommerce, logistics, and operations.<p>Companies will say they can't find talent and will pay whatever (i.e. pg), but it's bullshit, cost is still an enormous factor and they are working hard to keep it down via information asymmetry, bait-and-switch tactics (had several companies tell me one number on Hired and then go significantly lower in person), immigration lobbying, etc. De Blasio just signed some "tech talent pipeline" thing, which is pretty ridiculous given how many places rejected me.<p>If talent was really short, they wouldn't make people with 8 years of experience and a portfolio explain the difference between a linked list and array over the phone, they would be upfront about salary numbers (and actually show up with that number rather than one that was 10k lower) etc etc.<p>There is a ton of VC money out there and a lot of companies still think it's 2009 and they can get people cheap, a lot of average engineers are now VP of Engineering at some random startup with no team, and still thinking they can fill out that team with people making less than them. In reality, you have to pay me _more_ to take a lower role, not less like they expect.<p>Also this is unrelated to salary but I got rejected by tons of places for seemingly no reason, when it's not compensation expectations I think it's a general sense of elitism and "we have a high bar", "we need false negatives". It's idiotic to do that then complain you can't find people but they all do, I think they take a sick pride in rejecting people and feeling selective, even if it hurts them. I'm pretty sure if you are a qualified heart surgeon, most places looking for heart surgeons will hire you, but if you are a qualified engineer you go through an insane interview process and no matter how good you are, 70% of the time you get rejected for some bullshit false negative reason. Feel incredibly lucky I snagged that Google offer.<p>There is not tech talent shortage, it's 100% about cost. Meanwhile, in-house counsel with comparable experience can easily swing 160k base, the VCs and the CEOs pay themselves well, etc etc. They still view engineers as rank-and-file bitches who are at the bottom of the totem pole and whose salary must be kept low.<p>/rant