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

honestsalary.com

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

#81

Post by gkop »

For start up employees, what we really need is compensation tagged with company stage (seed, series A, series B, and so on). I know private entities that maintain such a database, so it's definitely doable. If AngelList added this feature, their database would be extremely useful [0].

Also it would help to ask for the date of the negotiation and allow filtering salaries by "negotiated in the last 90 days," "negotiated in the last year", etc..

In the meantime, in SF, the best thing I and my company have found is asking around our friends... not terribly scalable :/

[0] https://angel.co/salaries

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

#82

Post by veganman »

transman wrote: post #17

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...

As a vegan person, I won't fill it out unless I have guarantees that their infrastructure was built without hurting anything from the wonderful animal world in any way, shape or form. That would include their front-end consultant eating an egg for breakfast.

Also, as a helicopterkin, I find "other" offensive, there is no reason "male" or "female" should have more prevalence than "helicopter" in public forms.

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

#83

Post by xeromal »

467568985476 wrote: post #28
Diamons wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm guessing you never fly, because TSA only allows you to pick male or female.

Why the snark? It would be trivial to add another gender option to the page, and it would make the world a slightly friendlier place to a few people. Must everything be an argument?

I agree. I self-identify as black and refuse to fill out forms that force me to select my ethnicity.

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

#84

Post by veganman »

jdavis703 wrote: post #74
coldtea wrote: 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...

Yes, in this context it's extremely important. It's well accepted there's a pay gap between males and females. However there are also discrimination and pay differences for people who associate with non-cys gender identities. If you're going to expose wage information, it's important that it's done so not only in the name of efficient markets, but also in terms of social equality.

Isn't that kind of a strawman? I mean then what about race? What about the color of your teeth?

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

#85

Post by marssaxman »

mpeg wrote: 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…

Well, sure, but really, so what? I understand that we historically have a culture in which salary figures are secret, but that all seems to come from a bunch of social-hierarchy stuff about keeping up appearances and saving face. If someone doesn't care about that then what harm could even potentially come about as a result of sharing useful information with peers?

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

#86

Post by geofft »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #13

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…

The responses would be more useful with random / mandatory data, but this is perfectly useful. If I'm making $100K and someone in the same job role with the same qualifications/seniority is making $130K, I know that $130K is possible. I don't need to know if $130K is statistically within one standard deviation of the pay for my role; I can immediately go negotiate.

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

#87

Post by username223 »

RodericDay wrote: post #67
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #13

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…

> Self-selection ruins the data. Exactly. This is the issue that people who say "doesn't Glassdoor already do this?" minimize, and miss the point of why public salaries would be amazing in terms of improving labor markets. I think for anyone who is big into "free markets", there is an unresolved tension between "it's better if we let things continue as they are" and "a market always operates better when it has more i…

> I don't understand why so many staunch advocates for free markets easily opt for the former.

It's pretty obvious to me: this information asymmetry between employers and employees benefits employers, letting them lowball some hires. More information would make hiring more fair, but also hurt the bottom line, so they don't want it.

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

#88

Post by derwiki »

gkop wrote: post #81

For start up employees, what we really need is compensation tagged with company stage (seed, series A, series B, and so on). I know private entities that maintain such a database, so it's definitely doable. If AngelList added this feature, their database would be extremely useful [0]. Also it would help to ask for the date of the negotiation and allow filtering salaries by "negotiated in the last 90 days," "negotiate…

That AngelList tool is great! Thanks for sharing.

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

#90

Post by thisone »

antouank wrote: post #52
mpeg wrote: 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?

£120k is a hell of a lot. I've got to assume that's been translated into dollars.

Being the internet someone will tell me that "everyone in London with at least 2 years experience makes that, easy", but yeah, that number is high for a country where the Home Office considers £35k to be a fair reflection of skilled salaries.

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