Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

honestsalary.com

51–60 of 204 posts

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#51
post #25

Take aside legal aspects, why wouldn't any employee share their salary with their peers? All the secrecy just create noise, how could transparency be bad? I only see some incentive from the company's pov, you can position yourself somewhat better at bargaining salaries, when your employee has no access to the same data to debate, thus lowering costs a few percents. What am I missing?

Volunteer's dilemma. If everyone tells (honestly), it benefits the group as a whole. If only one tells, it would be to that individual's disadvantage, since she'll be seen as violating company secrecy policy. Some companies do set wages as confidential info.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#52
post #48

Okay, before you all start adding your data there, consider the fact that it's all made public. In the UK, post codes are usually very specific (sometimes to a single building) and I'm seeing someone from Colindale that has put in their entire postcode alongside their salary, this would be very easy to deanonimise by doing a reverse lookup on census data and then checking the job titles of the full names you'd get fo…

Good shout. And 120k GBP sounds like a lot. Is it supposed to be USD? Or is he converting a contractor's daily rate to a perm's salary?

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#53

Just posted this to the other discussion, but it bears just the same. This is just going to be a collection of anecdotes from people who self-select to report because they feel good about where they're at, or because they feel righteously justified in complaining about their situation. Self-selection ruins the data. The responses have to be random to be useful. And the silly thing is that most people who are involved…

My company had a similar spreadsheet internally that was self-selected and it was incredibly useful. I found that I had come in at the low range for my pay band and got a $10K raise in the next annual salary review. It's anonymous. I'm not sure why you think it'd be so susceptible to bragging or complaining. A lot of people, me included, are data nerds, and will contribute to the dataset regardless of our personal si…

That means you were 'bought' into thinking it was a good idea by a mere $10,000. Maybe you should have actually been paid $30k more all along - and still.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#54
post #7

If you're a new grad a good place to look at is your school's salary survey. For both MIT and CMU with just a BS the median starting salary is 105k (you have to be bottom half of the class to make less than that!) https://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2015-gss-... Min: $70,000 Max: $185,000 Mean: $106,407 https://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2015-su... Min: $30,000 Max: $150,000 Mean: $10…

That is a poorly worded comment. Someone can be really good but for whatever reason choose something that pays less or didn't get a great luck of the draw. To draw an absolute comparison between academic performance and salary for a whole class is laughable.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#55
As well noted, Glassdoor and other places already do this. Why do software developers feel compelled to constantly "invent" things we already have plenty of. Do something unique, original, or amazing. Stop copying everyone and just putting new UIs and a few extra database fields on stuff and calling it 'innovation'. So tired of the internet and all the noise clogging it up. Once the crash happens, we will have a glut of 'developers' who will claim they are disenfranchised and out of work and blame the economy... just like the steel-mill workers of the 70s/80s. We don't need this now, and we won't need it later when your main employer stops paying you because you don't actually BUILD anything interesting.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#57
post #39
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet. Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor? Heck, I'm a male, but often put female in forms, just to not give marketeers my info...

It's a useful criticism. In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about gender reassignment. Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other", they should be able to tick "female".

Well, but they can tick "female". Right?

I do think that "none" would be a useful addition, however. Or "whatever", maybe.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#58
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company had a similar spreadsheet internally that was self-selected and it was incredibly useful. I found that I had come in at the low range for my pay band and got a $10K raise in the next annual salary review. It's anonymous. I'm not sure why you think it'd be so susceptible to bragging or complaining. A lot of people, me included, are data nerds, and will contribute to the dataset regardless of our personal si…

I've pointed out some huge issues with the anonimity of this site in another comment. But apart from that, if a site has no privacy policy, you should have no expectation of privacy or anonimity. If they added an advertising tracking tag they could easily match the data you provide to your real name, your hobbies, your online shopping habits, your marital status...

Maybe fill it out via Tor, and fuzz the postal code.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#59
post #20

yikes... I make too little. :-/ I graduated from an ivy almost 15 years ago...

I don't understand why this matters. I can see why someone graduating just now from an Ivy should demand a better salary, but 15 years ago ... ? Not criticizing, I'm just curious as a foreigner. The US university system kind of remind you of the Indian caste system.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#60
post #35

As a transgender person, I won't fill it out unless I have the option to opt out of gender identification or select "other" for gender. I'm not alone. http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sd/news_article/1... http://www.autostraddle.com/facebook-wants-you-to-do-you-add...

There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet. Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor? Heck, I'm a male, but often put female in forms, just to not give marketeers my info...

But you want to lie about your identity on purpose; this person wants to get identified but cannot.
Post reply on HN