<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>piaste</author><text>&amp;gt; I am always surprised to see comments that make it sound like jobs (or, employees) are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold purely on price.&lt;p&gt;I highly doubt that the parent comment meant that he would literally apply to the job with the biggest number with no other consideration.&lt;p&gt;I read it as the far more modest claim that, if even _seeing_ the number requires a significant investment of time and effort on your side, the efficiency of the market is highly restricted. Especially since, once you do see the number, you usually need to take it or leave it within a short time frame; you can&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;open up&amp;quot; a lot of job offers and then pick the best.&lt;p&gt;To use the real-estate analogy again, how would the housing market be affected if buyers had to put down a deposit to even _see_ the listed price? And if the sellers had the ability to get a complete profile of the buyer before revealing their price?  It seems pretty clear to me that the average house price would significantly increase, despite the supply and demand both staying the same.</text><parent_chain><item><author>xyzelement</author><text>&amp;gt; A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job.&lt;p&gt;I am always surprised to see comments that make it sound like jobs (or, employees) are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold purely on price.&lt;p&gt;One simple example - two jobs may have the same title (Senior Developer, or whatever) but have totally different expectations of communication skills, leadership skills, ability to handle pressure, etc and would pay very differently. So you (and everyone else) would be tempted to apply for the top-paying job but potentially not be qualified.&lt;p&gt;Or the situation where a company is very flexible on who they hire and thus would pay a lot more or a lot less depending on what the individual brings to the table.&lt;p&gt;In a way, I think there&amp;#x27;s a bit of &amp;quot;you don&amp;#x27;t know what you don&amp;#x27;t know&amp;quot; principle at play here. If someone has limited perspective on how career development, seniority, and hiring work, they may really believe that the big problem is &amp;quot;I can&amp;#x27;t sort my opportunities by salary.&amp;quot; Someone with more experience and understanding may recognize how non-fungible people and roles can be in a way that a simple &amp;quot;sort by price&amp;quot; cannot capture.&lt;p&gt;To use your real-estate analogy, would you ever buy a house that came up first in a price-sort? No, you&amp;#x27;d both want to really understand the nuances of the house (location, condition, etc.) and how it compares to your needs and your ability to pay. IE, you&amp;#x27;d often take &amp;quot;not the best price&amp;quot; because either there&amp;#x27;s something wrong with the property or it&amp;#x27;s just not suitable to your needs.&amp;quot; Hiring is much the same.</text></item><item><author>ClumsyPilot</author><text>A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job.&lt;p&gt;However companies don&amp;#x27;t want to compete on salary, and potentialy drive them up - they want maximum leverage. They get more leverage if process is obscure, so that you only agree salary late in the process and for the applicant, pulling out is risky.&lt;p&gt;The market is not really free - its being manipulated by one side.&lt;p&gt;Similarly with healthcare you don&amp;#x27;t know how much you will be charged upfront, so there is no competition on price.&lt;p&gt;With housing (in UK) there is no competition on quality because the seller doesn&amp;#x27;t have to disclose any problems with the house. If it falls of a cliff the minute you sign on the dotted line, it&amp;#x27;s your problem.&lt;p&gt;You have to pay for the surveyor to find out any issues the house might have, and that means you can only view a few houses before you&amp;#x27;ve paid the house price in survey fees.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/nh7s8f/but_not_in_colorado/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>analog31</author><text>Interestingly, I use price-sort extensively when doing online shopping. I don&amp;#x27;t often buy the thing that comes up first, but I certainly use it to help figure out the tradeoff between price and quality, and to filter out items that I have no reason to consider. Also, price-sort eliminates one of the psychological burdens of shopping, which is the manipulative presentation of products by the vendor.&lt;p&gt;Price-sort is a very crude version of an even more powerful tool, which is: &amp;quot;Show me everything about every product, without trying to manipulate me, and let me organize the data by criteria that I choose, not that you choose.&amp;quot; This is why Excel pivot tables are so popular in business.&lt;p&gt;Anything that makes the job search function less psychological has to be beneficial. Nothing prevents me from taking a pay cut for a particular job that I absolutely love, in a favored location, etc.&lt;p&gt;Oddly enough, product marketing and hiring share a common feature, which is that both fields have endless amounts of verbiage about how psychological manipulation is actually beneficial to the person being manipulated. If so, it should be an opt-in feature, perhaps even one that people are willing to pay for.</text><parent_chain><item><author>xyzelement</author><text>&amp;gt; A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job.&lt;p&gt;I am always surprised to see comments that make it sound like jobs (or, employees) are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold purely on price.&lt;p&gt;One simple example - two jobs may have the same title (Senior Developer, or whatever) but have totally different expectations of communication skills, leadership skills, ability to handle pressure, etc and would pay very differently. So you (and everyone else) would be tempted to apply for the top-paying job but potentially not be qualified.&lt;p&gt;Or the situation where a company is very flexible on who they hire and thus would pay a lot more or a lot less depending on what the individual brings to the table.&lt;p&gt;In a way, I think there&amp;#x27;s a bit of &amp;quot;you don&amp;#x27;t know what you don&amp;#x27;t know&amp;quot; principle at play here. If someone has limited perspective on how career development, seniority, and hiring work, they may really believe that the big problem is &amp;quot;I can&amp;#x27;t sort my opportunities by salary.&amp;quot; Someone with more experience and understanding may recognize how non-fungible people and roles can be in a way that a simple &amp;quot;sort by price&amp;quot; cannot capture.&lt;p&gt;To use your real-estate analogy, would you ever buy a house that came up first in a price-sort? No, you&amp;#x27;d both want to really understand the nuances of the house (location, condition, etc.) and how it compares to your needs and your ability to pay. IE, you&amp;#x27;d often take &amp;quot;not the best price&amp;quot; because either there&amp;#x27;s something wrong with the property or it&amp;#x27;s just not suitable to your needs.&amp;quot; Hiring is much the same.</text></item><item><author>ClumsyPilot</author><text>A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job.&lt;p&gt;However companies don&amp;#x27;t want to compete on salary, and potentialy drive them up - they want maximum leverage. They get more leverage if process is obscure, so that you only agree salary late in the process and for the applicant, pulling out is risky.&lt;p&gt;The market is not really free - its being manipulated by one side.&lt;p&gt;Similarly with healthcare you don&amp;#x27;t know how much you will be charged upfront, so there is no competition on price.&lt;p&gt;With housing (in UK) there is no competition on quality because the seller doesn&amp;#x27;t have to disclose any problems with the house. If it falls of a cliff the minute you sign on the dotted line, it&amp;#x27;s your problem.&lt;p&gt;You have to pay for the surveyor to find out any issues the house might have, and that means you can only view a few houses before you&amp;#x27;ve paid the house price in survey fees.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/nh7s8f/but_not_in_colorado/</url></story>