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

Post by vehementi » Sat, Mar 19, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #34

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…

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…

Post by vehementi » Sat, Mar 19, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #31

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…

It's not actually that bad. First, even in your version, the "feel goods" (high salaries) and the "complainers" (low salaries) would cancel each other out, and (assuming equal numbers of them) will give us a usable median value. But in the real world is more complicated than "self-selection" in the basic mode you describe. Who might "feel good" and who might feel "justified in complaining" will not be so much based o…

Post by Gratsby » Sat, Mar 19, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

darkxanthos wrote: post #33

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…

Salary.com, glassdoor and other resources are not random but they are useful.

Post by zdragnar » Sat, Mar 19, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

username223 wrote: post #87

RodericDay wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by cjrp » Sat, Mar 19, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

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?