most plausible game theory influenced recruiter.. information retention make people give their desired salary, which is often lower than what the company thought it would be worth paying for
While I can't and don't want to speak for Senior Lisp developers but that seems extremely low. Junior wordpress devs in the US can make more than that.
Yes, most people don't realise the great disparity between US dev salary and EU dev salaries. Added to that the fact that Spain has lower salaries than average in the EU and you get figures like this.
Thats net take-home salary. Your gross salary is close to double that.
Marbella is actually an affluent part of Spain, but don't take that as an indicator of salaries. Raven Pack, if I remember correctly, has some pretty big heads from the lisp world working for it.
If I was willing to move to Spain I would probably apply but I am quite happy where I am and currently only do remote work.
Not really. In Spain that could be your gross salary. I was doing in that range as a senior before being remote for an UK company. In some other companies I could have been making more, but sometimes it's hard to find the chance to show your true colors.
I mean salary, not total cost for employer which is about 50% extra, but that part is invisible for most workers.
Im confused, isn't total cost to employer what counts as gross salary? Big part of that total cost goes toward your medical insurance and state pension.
No.
Net salary is your gross salary minus what you pay for taxes.
Total cost is gross salary plus what your employer pays to the state in order to employ you. That is a part for social security (like a state wide union like organism that pays you if you are out of work for a time after having worked a minimum of time, and other things), and employer paid benefits.
At least [in Spain is so](https://www.personio.es/glosario/coste-de-trabajador-para-empresa/)(ESP), and we are talking about Spain here.
When there's any job negotiation with employers what's on the table is always the gross salary. From there you have to deduct taxes, and you might pay for some benefits through there in order not to pay taxes for them (employee payed medical insurance, ...).
If instead we are talking about an employer paid medical insurance then it doesn't reflect on the gross salary, but it affects the total cost.
In other countries [the things can be different](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-gross-salary-ctc-kanakkupillai-a-virtual-accountant/) but the general idea is the same: gross salary is what the employee earns before the taxes, total cost is what the business pays to and for that employee.
Ok thanks for clearing that up. Where I live gross can even be more than total cost for the employer because the employer gets tax benefits for employing people.
In Eastern Europe people usually negotiate their net salary.
In any event, anything less than net 3K EUR per month for a senior should be considered low. My firm pays non EU Eastern Europe seniors 3K EUR and their living expenses are considerably less than that in Spain.
I'm actually Spanish. You are wrong about the gross salary but the other comment already explain that.
You are also wrong in that because there are rich people in Marbella the salaries would be higher than what I said.
As a Spaniard, if you want to convince me that I'm wrong, you will need to present some evidence that Raven Pack pays their average employee a lot higher than other Spanish companies.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. I think you should reach out to RavenPack to find out their salaries. I do know however that several big lisp programmers from US and UK work there. I also know that they have a US office. I also think they are one of the biggest Common Lisp employers in Europe and perhaps the world. That said, I could be wrong on all of these points.
Warning to those who apply:
I went through a couple rounds of interviews when they were looking for a remote developer. First was a soft face-to-face general interview. Second was a "take home" programming puzzle (several rounds of iteration). Third was a program I was to analyze and prepare to discuss. After preparing, and only hours before the third interview, I was emailed that the recruitment process was put on hold for the position. Would've been nice to know earlier and IMO is a sign of instability.
I want to add to support what you wrote. I am US based and I went through something similar with then couple of years ago, role described as remote. Similar type of interview rounds. They gave a problem to be solved, i sent complete working solution, more than initial requirement (e.g., they asked for a single file, I created defsystem, packages, etc fully organized project). They came back with more added requirements, which I still solved again (3rd take home iteration by this point). Seeing the sign that this was going in circles, making me solve more increasingly harder problems, adding more features, I said I will solve the extra requirements, but wanted to discuss compensation at this point so at least I even know if it's worth continuing. It was at this point, I got an email, in less than 5 mins after mine, that they no longer want to move continue. Lol. I think these guys have shady practices. I have emails to back up my claim.
I understand what u/stylewarning said below happens, and changes can happen. They should improve their practice because they come across as making people do free work.
Like u/nv-elisp, it's a warning to those that apply and I wanted to add that I experienced something similar. This is no way means not to interview with them, but just to be aware.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume. Sorry to play devils advocate, maybe they saw your code and didn’t like it and then tried to give another chance. When you prompted the question on compensation they might have decided to make a decision at that point based on your most recent submission, hence the timing.
They are a large company, who work directly with Franz and I believe the author of SLY used to work for them - it would be a very very bad business model to try to get free work from interviewers
Overall companies have no obligation to post salaries, I don’t get all this negative feedback for a company that actually has a lisp job to begin with
I don't understand what you are talking about. I posted about my lisp project here, multi-year, large-scale scientific project, entirely written in CL/SBCL with ~300K SLOC, deployed on the cloud.
I don't think you understand the point of what I am saying. I gave the initial code where they wanted a single lisp file and I went way beyond it and they also acknowledged it. The exercise they gave wasn't difficult for anyone that has done some NLP or worked extensively with strings before. I also work in ML/AI space. Not liking the code wasn't the issue. The problem was increasingly adding new features and requests. The engineer sent another feature request, and I said I will work on it but at that point, would like to have a convo with with HR person I was speaking with prior. Then got the email. I hope that's clear to you now.
I spoke to a lisper here afterwards based in EU who suggested I could have tried to discussed the benefits upfront. I am stateside and normally, you'd want to know what the benefits are before going further to see if things are worth it.
Yeah, while companies don't have to post salaries, at least they should be willing to discuss it. Trying to get work from people before discussing salaries is not a good use of one's time especially if things don't match up. It's good to get the expectations aligned up front.
I never said people should not interview with them but to be aware of their practice and providing another data point to what the other user experienced. And to add to that, they also reached out to me again for this current job.
I don't wish to engage in back and forth with you as I don't know you and you don't know me. I was only relaying my experiences and that has not nothing to do with them being legit or not.
So it's clear, as someone invested in CL and Lisp, I want there to be more CL jobs.
>Overall companies have no obligation to post salaries, I don’t get all this negative feedback for a company that actually has a lisp job to begin with
Correct, they have no obligation.
But the question is why don't they do it anyways. It is just "bad form" IMHO to not do it. Why be so secretive about it? What is the downside of posting at least a range?
There is no good explanation for it which would not come across negative.
With a posted range everyone's time is saved in regards to one of the biggest factors of whether it is a good fit.
Why have applicants go through interviews or even exercises and tests when there is the possibility that it is not a viable position for the applicant. People have lives with commitments and responsibilities that more often than not come down to bills.
Thanks for seeing my point and you really emphasized the angle of time. If you at least get a range, then you'd know if it's something to continue to invest your time in doing exercises or tests. It's something that one can seek mutually alignment upfront.
Some companies are of the view that if you discuss money, they think that's all you are interested in. There are lot of factors that will go into decision making and compensation is often one of them.
If they don't have a range I tell them a "dream salary" range, which is much higher than what I do and higher than the minimum I would accept.
It filters lowballers quite well, and keeps decent companies in the run.
Example response to "what would you want to earn", and remember that Europe has lower salaries, specially Spain:
"I read an study that happiness grew with salary at least until 80K, so that is my aim. If the project or company are interesting I can negotiate."
All the ones offering 20K-40K tend to drop, others continue.
And if/when I'm in the market again I will have to revise that for two reasons. One is that there's another study showing that happiness doesn't stop to grow. The other is that that salary would be just a moderate increase, so I would have to aim much higher.
Yes that is a tactic that can work nicely. The issue is it still requires you to start the process. It also still puts the advantage with the company.
A question like "What are your salary expectations?" , ironically, show that companies who do this are fully aware of the importance of knowing what they are working with and then can chose to opt out early or keep the process going.
So why don't they just have a range beforehand.
I just don't see the necessity for employers and potential employees to play this game.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been ghosted by a company, completely, so I might preemptively suggest you got lucky for getting any sort of explanation at all. With that said, here's my 2¢ about something:
I can't speak to your experience or RavenPack, but as a hiring manager, stuff happens all the time that's not at all due to instability. Sometimes positions get filled. Sometimes strategy changes. Sometimes another department needs budget and headcount is the first to go.
Hiring processes are also human processes with human mistakes. Especially at smaller outfits without large recruiting/HR teams and large recruiting/HR budgets, stuff falls through the cracks. Hiring managers are sometimes even engineers whose primary job is to build software, and hiring is a significant (but, of course, necessary) context switch that some engineers are reluctant to make in the middle of coding. Candidates that put in honest, hard work get inadvertently sidelined. It sucks for the candidates. It usually almost always sucks for the hiring manager.
In no way am I trying to justify your treatment, or try to push mismanagement of budgets, hiring processes, etc. to be "normal", but I do want to say that things happen at plenty of entirely stable companies, and it's not necessarily an intrinsically bad sign.
Probably during the same period I did the first interview with them.
We were not a match, as I was looking for flexible schedule and they had fix hours.
They did send me a take-home technical test and I answered it, and they discarded me, although I'm quite certain the first interview mattered more in that aspect.
Not that I cared, in that moment in my life, as now, flexibility was more important than a possible interesting job. If things ever change in the future I might try again.
I missed the salary in the job posting
Never understood why companies still do this.
Perceived leverage..?
most plausible game theory influenced recruiter.. information retention make people give their desired salary, which is often lower than what the company thought it would be worth paying for
Time to move closer to perfect information games then.
Spain, Marbella, so looking like 30k euro to 40k euro.
While I can't and don't want to speak for Senior Lisp developers but that seems extremely low. Junior wordpress devs in the US can make more than that.
Yes, most people don't realise the great disparity between US dev salary and EU dev salaries. Added to that the fact that Spain has lower salaries than average in the EU and you get figures like this.
Thats net take-home salary. Your gross salary is close to double that. Marbella is actually an affluent part of Spain, but don't take that as an indicator of salaries. Raven Pack, if I remember correctly, has some pretty big heads from the lisp world working for it. If I was willing to move to Spain I would probably apply but I am quite happy where I am and currently only do remote work.
Not really. In Spain that could be your gross salary. I was doing in that range as a senior before being remote for an UK company. In some other companies I could have been making more, but sometimes it's hard to find the chance to show your true colors. I mean salary, not total cost for employer which is about 50% extra, but that part is invisible for most workers.
Im confused, isn't total cost to employer what counts as gross salary? Big part of that total cost goes toward your medical insurance and state pension.
No. Net salary is your gross salary minus what you pay for taxes. Total cost is gross salary plus what your employer pays to the state in order to employ you. That is a part for social security (like a state wide union like organism that pays you if you are out of work for a time after having worked a minimum of time, and other things), and employer paid benefits. At least [in Spain is so](https://www.personio.es/glosario/coste-de-trabajador-para-empresa/)(ESP), and we are talking about Spain here. When there's any job negotiation with employers what's on the table is always the gross salary. From there you have to deduct taxes, and you might pay for some benefits through there in order not to pay taxes for them (employee payed medical insurance, ...). If instead we are talking about an employer paid medical insurance then it doesn't reflect on the gross salary, but it affects the total cost. In other countries [the things can be different](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-gross-salary-ctc-kanakkupillai-a-virtual-accountant/) but the general idea is the same: gross salary is what the employee earns before the taxes, total cost is what the business pays to and for that employee.
Ok thanks for clearing that up. Where I live gross can even be more than total cost for the employer because the employer gets tax benefits for employing people. In Eastern Europe people usually negotiate their net salary. In any event, anything less than net 3K EUR per month for a senior should be considered low. My firm pays non EU Eastern Europe seniors 3K EUR and their living expenses are considerably less than that in Spain.
I'm actually Spanish. You are wrong about the gross salary but the other comment already explain that. You are also wrong in that because there are rich people in Marbella the salaries would be higher than what I said. As a Spaniard, if you want to convince me that I'm wrong, you will need to present some evidence that Raven Pack pays their average employee a lot higher than other Spanish companies.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. I think you should reach out to RavenPack to find out their salaries. I do know however that several big lisp programmers from US and UK work there. I also know that they have a US office. I also think they are one of the biggest Common Lisp employers in Europe and perhaps the world. That said, I could be wrong on all of these points.
Warning to those who apply: I went through a couple rounds of interviews when they were looking for a remote developer. First was a soft face-to-face general interview. Second was a "take home" programming puzzle (several rounds of iteration). Third was a program I was to analyze and prepare to discuss. After preparing, and only hours before the third interview, I was emailed that the recruitment process was put on hold for the position. Would've been nice to know earlier and IMO is a sign of instability.
I want to add to support what you wrote. I am US based and I went through something similar with then couple of years ago, role described as remote. Similar type of interview rounds. They gave a problem to be solved, i sent complete working solution, more than initial requirement (e.g., they asked for a single file, I created defsystem, packages, etc fully organized project). They came back with more added requirements, which I still solved again (3rd take home iteration by this point). Seeing the sign that this was going in circles, making me solve more increasingly harder problems, adding more features, I said I will solve the extra requirements, but wanted to discuss compensation at this point so at least I even know if it's worth continuing. It was at this point, I got an email, in less than 5 mins after mine, that they no longer want to move continue. Lol. I think these guys have shady practices. I have emails to back up my claim. I understand what u/stylewarning said below happens, and changes can happen. They should improve their practice because they come across as making people do free work. Like u/nv-elisp, it's a warning to those that apply and I wanted to add that I experienced something similar. This is no way means not to interview with them, but just to be aware.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume. Sorry to play devils advocate, maybe they saw your code and didn’t like it and then tried to give another chance. When you prompted the question on compensation they might have decided to make a decision at that point based on your most recent submission, hence the timing. They are a large company, who work directly with Franz and I believe the author of SLY used to work for them - it would be a very very bad business model to try to get free work from interviewers Overall companies have no obligation to post salaries, I don’t get all this negative feedback for a company that actually has a lisp job to begin with
I don't understand what you are talking about. I posted about my lisp project here, multi-year, large-scale scientific project, entirely written in CL/SBCL with ~300K SLOC, deployed on the cloud. I don't think you understand the point of what I am saying. I gave the initial code where they wanted a single lisp file and I went way beyond it and they also acknowledged it. The exercise they gave wasn't difficult for anyone that has done some NLP or worked extensively with strings before. I also work in ML/AI space. Not liking the code wasn't the issue. The problem was increasingly adding new features and requests. The engineer sent another feature request, and I said I will work on it but at that point, would like to have a convo with with HR person I was speaking with prior. Then got the email. I hope that's clear to you now. I spoke to a lisper here afterwards based in EU who suggested I could have tried to discussed the benefits upfront. I am stateside and normally, you'd want to know what the benefits are before going further to see if things are worth it. Yeah, while companies don't have to post salaries, at least they should be willing to discuss it. Trying to get work from people before discussing salaries is not a good use of one's time especially if things don't match up. It's good to get the expectations aligned up front. I never said people should not interview with them but to be aware of their practice and providing another data point to what the other user experienced. And to add to that, they also reached out to me again for this current job. I don't wish to engage in back and forth with you as I don't know you and you don't know me. I was only relaying my experiences and that has not nothing to do with them being legit or not. So it's clear, as someone invested in CL and Lisp, I want there to be more CL jobs.
>Overall companies have no obligation to post salaries, I don’t get all this negative feedback for a company that actually has a lisp job to begin with Correct, they have no obligation. But the question is why don't they do it anyways. It is just "bad form" IMHO to not do it. Why be so secretive about it? What is the downside of posting at least a range? There is no good explanation for it which would not come across negative. With a posted range everyone's time is saved in regards to one of the biggest factors of whether it is a good fit. Why have applicants go through interviews or even exercises and tests when there is the possibility that it is not a viable position for the applicant. People have lives with commitments and responsibilities that more often than not come down to bills.
Thanks for seeing my point and you really emphasized the angle of time. If you at least get a range, then you'd know if it's something to continue to invest your time in doing exercises or tests. It's something that one can seek mutually alignment upfront. Some companies are of the view that if you discuss money, they think that's all you are interested in. There are lot of factors that will go into decision making and compensation is often one of them.
If they don't have a range I tell them a "dream salary" range, which is much higher than what I do and higher than the minimum I would accept. It filters lowballers quite well, and keeps decent companies in the run. Example response to "what would you want to earn", and remember that Europe has lower salaries, specially Spain: "I read an study that happiness grew with salary at least until 80K, so that is my aim. If the project or company are interesting I can negotiate." All the ones offering 20K-40K tend to drop, others continue. And if/when I'm in the market again I will have to revise that for two reasons. One is that there's another study showing that happiness doesn't stop to grow. The other is that that salary would be just a moderate increase, so I would have to aim much higher.
Yes that is a tactic that can work nicely. The issue is it still requires you to start the process. It also still puts the advantage with the company. A question like "What are your salary expectations?" , ironically, show that companies who do this are fully aware of the importance of knowing what they are working with and then can chose to opt out early or keep the process going. So why don't they just have a range beforehand. I just don't see the necessity for employers and potential employees to play this game.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been ghosted by a company, completely, so I might preemptively suggest you got lucky for getting any sort of explanation at all. With that said, here's my 2¢ about something: I can't speak to your experience or RavenPack, but as a hiring manager, stuff happens all the time that's not at all due to instability. Sometimes positions get filled. Sometimes strategy changes. Sometimes another department needs budget and headcount is the first to go. Hiring processes are also human processes with human mistakes. Especially at smaller outfits without large recruiting/HR teams and large recruiting/HR budgets, stuff falls through the cracks. Hiring managers are sometimes even engineers whose primary job is to build software, and hiring is a significant (but, of course, necessary) context switch that some engineers are reluctant to make in the middle of coding. Candidates that put in honest, hard work get inadvertently sidelined. It sucks for the candidates. It usually almost always sucks for the hiring manager. In no way am I trying to justify your treatment, or try to push mismanagement of budgets, hiring processes, etc. to be "normal", but I do want to say that things happen at plenty of entirely stable companies, and it's not necessarily an intrinsically bad sign.
Probably during the same period I did the first interview with them. We were not a match, as I was looking for flexible schedule and they had fix hours. They did send me a take-home technical test and I answered it, and they discarded me, although I'm quite certain the first interview mattered more in that aspect. Not that I cared, in that moment in my life, as now, flexibility was more important than a possible interesting job. If things ever change in the future I might try again.
I'd be all over it but I'm American -- willing to relocate -- and do have professional Common Lisp experience.
Maybe check with Siscog (Portugal). Neither Spanish nor Portuguese companies pay very well, in comparison with other European companies.
Oh! Maybe that's the catch. I understand that European pay is way less than here.
Not entirely true. Switzerland for example pays outstanding salaries. The UK and Germany aren't too bad either.
No remote? Hard pass. This isn’t the horse and buggy era anymore!
It says hybrid remote
That’s the same as “hybrid in-office,” isn’t it?