Referring someone for a job is a favor, but holding the salary hostage to test their enthusiasm is just an unfair power play.

When an engineer shared a niche opening with old university contacts and deliberately kept the salary range vague, the group went from uninterested to frustrated in record time.

Keep reading for the full story.

AITA for telling old uni folks about a job opening but not disclosing [the good] salary it has?

I just learned of a job opening in my engineering discipline — I’m not interested in it, so I passed it along to chatrooms with people I know who could be a fit, old folks from uni.

But this engineer left out one very important detail.

I know about the salary range (which is good), but I chose not to include it when talking to people because I wanted to make sure they had at least a minimum of affinity.

They are spread across many different subfields, and this is just one of them — not a very popular one, in fact.

He feels he had a duty to ensure they aren’t just in it for the money.

In the end, it’s also my responsibility to ensure that this person can be a reasonable match to the job as a whole. Otherwise, I feel like a clown being a bridge to something that doesn’t make sense.

But now he’s catching some backlash for it.

Now people are low-key grilling me for being mysterious about it, especially after I mentioned that the range is “good” but didn’t give any numbers.

AITA?

When it comes to applying for a new job, it helps to be equipped with as much information as possible.

What did Reddit have to say?

This user also doesn’t approve of this engineer’s withholding.

In this economy, no candidate should be blamed for caring about a job’s salary.

Frankly, this engineer is acting way out of line.

Compensation just isn’t something you should mess around about.

At the end of the day, if the pay is good, the candidate deserves to know that.

Unnecessary gatekeeping is not the vibe.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.