You nailed it: there is power in that mutual gesture - it creates a bond that pushes both parties to work through challenges instead of just noping out with a break up. There's a reason they call it "tying the knot".
Source: A 40-year old who has no interest in marriage and only saw it as an "antiquated social construct" when I was younger. I learned there's more to it.
The transparency is great and is clearly a value-add for candidates, IMO.
But the salary simply does not compete with HCOL Startup Senior+ Engineers (around 20- 40% lower than Staff level).
That said, Oxide is in a unique class of startups that can still hire strong talent despite this pay deficit (whether due to an exceptional product, team, technical challenge, or other rare attribute). I know a Software Engineer who just took a 25% pay cut to join a construction analytics SaaS startup because he has heard his brother (a Surveyor) complain specifically about problems this company's solving!
I was actually completely unaware of Oxide's or Bryan's existence until yesterday - I had no clue they were both known on here, let alone so popular!
I'm just an HN user who was browsing jobs, found this one that listed the exact salary (with this link to their philosophy) - I had never seen this approach before and wanted to hear what HN felt about it.
This is roughly the Senior (5-10 YOE) salary range at Bay Area startups post-Series A.
Staff-level or higher starts at around $230K and occasionally reaches $275K.
The salary data comes from researching roughly 250 Bay Area startups. I'm personally defining startups as some combination of: Series A - D, founded post-2015, less than 100 Engineers.
Thanks for explaining! For future reference: would it have been OK if the post had the same title, but I left the URL box empty and placed the URL in the Text box along with a few sentences for context?
Good question! The answer is no—text posts are actually penalized to prevent that scenario—they're downweighted by default, and don't have live links by default. From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html:
Q: How do I make a link in a text submission?
A: You can't. This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.
On HN, the idea is that submitters shouldn't have any special right to frame the story for others. They're welcome to express their opinion, of course, but it should be done in a comment, because then it's on a level playing field with everyone else's opinion.
I'm sorry for any trouble I caused here. I have no affiliation with the company, but just came across this company/its post and thought "Interesting! I wonder what HN readers will think."
Not your fault -- the title you put on it wasn't unreasonable, it's just that tensions are running high and there is a tremendous amount of mistrust out there. I think dang's guidance is really good in general: by using the title on the piece, you let the piece speak for itself. And there's definitely a reason I didn't title the piece this way!
Source: A 40-year old who has no interest in marriage and only saw it as an "antiquated social construct" when I was younger. I learned there's more to it.