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

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

#131

Post by BinaryIdiot »

nhumrich wrote: post #69

Am I the only one that feels shaky sharing my salary? I work at a start up and if I share my position and company it won't really be anonymous, as I am the only person at the company with that position. I do agree its nice for people to post their salaries so i know if I'm underpaid. But what if I'm overpaid, or at least played more than most at my company? What will that do to people I work with who find or how much…

Ultimately salary transparency is actually a net positive. You can easily know if you're over or under paid and all groups (gender, ethnicity, etc) can see how their pay compares to the other groups.

Yes there is a pain point that you mention when transitioning to such transparency. If the company hasn't been typically fair with salaries or not properly explaining why person X isn't getting Y then it's not going to be fun. But overall it should give you a better position to negotiate a higher salary when you're underpaid and it makes everyone well aware if discrimination is happening.

I'll tell anyone who asks. I don't publicize because most people I work with are really uncomfortable with it but personally I don't care and I think ultimately, as a society, we're going to move in that direction. It's just going to take a long time.

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

#132

Post by BinaryIdiot »

home_boi wrote: post #112
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...

Why is gender included to begin with? It just adds extra, unneeded noise to the data.

I would except ALL aspects of demographics would be useful here. Not just gender but ethnicity, age hell I could even see height being useful considering you hear a lot of "you have to be taller to be CEO" crap; it would be interesting if there is anything to those stereotypes.

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

#134

Post by BinaryIdiot »

LorenzoLlamas wrote: post #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…

> Why do software developers feel compelled to constantly "invent" things we already have plenty of. Do something unique, original, or amazing.

You're completely right.

I'm glad no one redid MySpace / friendster better. We have plenty of social sites!

I'm glad no one redid altavista / Yahoo search. We have too many!!!

I'm glad no one tried to make yet another email client after AOL / compuserve.

I'm glad no one else got into the space industry after Boeing / BST / ATCO / Lockheed; what a waste of time!

I'm glad no one made another laptop after the Epson / HP. So stupid!

I'm glad no one tried their hand at making a tablet; Microsoft essentially invented the category! No one could have done better! No one!

I'm glad no one reinvented the smart phone / pda. Who needs anything but Windows Mobile 6 / Palm / Newton?

(I could go on for longer than the text field on HN can hold)

> Once the crash happens, we will have a glut of 'developers' who will claim they are disenfranchised and out of work

This will never happen even if there was a "crash". You forget that literally every single industry is moving to be more and more technologically controlled, automated, savy, etc; you really think that if there is a "crash" that software developers are going to just sit there out of work? It wouldn't last long...

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

#135

Post by tedmiston »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #131
nhumrich wrote: post #69

Am I the only one that feels shaky sharing my salary? I work at a start up and if I share my position and company it won't really be anonymous, as I am the only person at the company with that position. I do agree its nice for people to post their salaries so i know if I'm underpaid. But what if I'm overpaid, or at least played more than most at my company? What will that do to people I work with who find or how much…

Ultimately salary transparency is actually a net positive. You can easily know if you're over or under paid and all groups (gender, ethnicity, etc) can see how their pay compares to the other groups. Yes there is a pain point that you mention when transitioning to such transparency. If the company hasn't been typically fair with salaries or not properly explaining why person X isn't getting Y then it's not going to b…

It's a net positive for some people.

You will tell your salary to anyone who asks, and I will also enjoy having that conversation with anyone for the additional data points, if nothing else. However, some people become really uncomfortable if they learn they're making less than others in similar positions. Especially if you work at an early to mid stage startup that doesn't have things like pay bands and formulaic raises.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by substack »

This salary-focused data collection (aside from issues with self-selecting mentioned elsewhere here) is missing a huge number of freelancers who have much more variable income from contracts and other kinds of unpredictable work. Most discussions of wages in tech ignore this rather large cohort that is difficult to count and often forgotten.

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

#138

Post by orangecat »

a_imho wrote: 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?

Take aside legal aspects, why wouldn't any employee share their salary with their peers?

If your salary is lower than average, it may cause coworkers to at least subconsciously believe that you're a weak performer. If it's higher than average, it can cause resentment among others who think that they're as good or better than you. Plus, it opens the door to being classified as wasteful or cheap if your perceived spending patterns don't seem to match your salary.

The best way to do something like this is to anonymize individuals and publish averages.

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

#139

Post by fapjacks »

mettamage wrote: post #8
eitally wrote: post #4

Why, just why? Besides Glassdoor, there's now comparably.com (which I also question), plus Quora and mobile apps like Blind. Imho, Glassdoor is actually pretty accurate and you can fill in the gaps (things like vesting schedules, promotion paths, etc) through searching and asking questions on Quora.

Here's a peculiar opinion. I don't have them often, so enjoy ;) I agree that implementing an idea that is fairly common already has a high risk of adding only marginal value. I didn't see the website yet, but I was thinking the same thing "don't we have salary sites already? Why would we need another one?" Then I read your comment and to be honest (and peculiar): if all the value that the website was is having your c…

It would be a very valuable company, that could automate these kinds of insights and aggregate them for individuals.

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

#140

Post by ant6n »

veganman wrote: post #84
jdavis703 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Kinda curious whether teeth whitening does make a difference.
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