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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

#161

Post by anonsalarylol »

siliconc0w wrote: post #127

I'd make this site more focus about apples to apples comparison within the same company. I.e 'Share your salary at X and invite your colleagues to do the same'. So people could go to honestsalary.com/company and collaborate there with the main page showing the aggregate. And maybe instead of job title use department and 'level' to make it more ambiguous. I.e engineering,marketing,operations or 'associate, sr, manager…

Here's the source for a small webapp to anonymously share your salary with a pool of others: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/894b151cc981f783e3af I did try to make most of the selections ambiguous in order to better preserve anonymity. The way it works is that the pool creator sets a minimum number of responses before anyone can see the salary info. You also can't see any salary info unless you yourself have submitted.

I made it a while back for people trying to understand tech salaries in a particular area. It's not geared towards startups but maybe someone can modify it.

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

#162

Post by sosuke »

bigtunacan wrote: post #158
sosuke wrote: post #150

If I were making a good deal more than my peer what do I gain by being fair and honest. What makes it fair? Why shouldn't I make more or less by the skill of negotiation? I've not yet read a reason for the top paid people to talk about their salary. It seems they would have more to risk than gain and it would hurt them in the next negotiation. Not having spoken about my salary I've got no idea if I make more or less.…

Why should someone more qualified make less just because they are a bad negotiator or just unaware of what everyone makes? Employers typically want this information because as a whole it is in their favor, not the employees' favor to keep this information from being disclosed. I have experience working in both the private and public sector. Private sector salaries (USA) are typically not publicly disclosed and compan…

I feel like you're approaching it from the concept that the world should be fair. I'm coming from the other angle.

What if you ask for a raise and they said something such as "we can't give you a raise because we can't afford to give everyone a raise." Seems like the knowing of salaries doesn't cure that. "We don't have anymore budget" "We don't have any room for another senior blah"

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

#163

Post by BinaryIdiot »

jeremyt wrote: post #141
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree. The problem here is that every company has above average performers, average performers, and below average performers. However, almost everyone thinks they are an above average performer. Therefore, if salaries are shared, at least two thirds of your workers are liable to be pissed off at what they are making, even though the amount is completely fair based on their actual worth to the company.

> almost everyone thinks they are an above average performer.[...]Therefore, if salaries are shared, at least two thirds of your workers are liable to be pissed off at what they are making, even though the amount is completely fair based on their actual worth to the company.

This is a strawman. Where is your data to back up that "almost everyone thinks they are an above average performer"? At least anecdotally I've never run into anything close to that. Almost everyone I've ever worked with that would be considered at or below average knew very well where they were. Their managers also had the data and would sit down and discuss it with them so even if they thought they weren't they certainly knew the company felt they were.

Perhaps if you jumped into an organization where feedback wasn't given (or given honestly) and opened up salaries you could have an issue. But the majority of companies should be giving employees valid, data-backed feedback which would not make them surprised if someone better performing is making more money than them.

Buffer[0] seems to do well with it and an experiment where a Plumbing company[1] did it ended up having lots of positives out of it. Those are just two data points but it shows it's doable. If you have data that shows otherwise, especially for the numbers you made up, feel free to post it as I would be interested in it.

[0] https://open.buffer.com/transparent-salaries/ [1] http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4422455/Pimlic...

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

#164

Post by BinaryIdiot »

fapjacks wrote: post #143
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like with Glassdoor you're not going to be able to verify. Ideally most people will be truthful and the fakes will be minimal but all it takes is a single 4chan "raid" on a new site to populate it with tons of bullshit making it useless. Now the site could at least verify email addresses before showing them to ensure it's not a bot and make people less likely to make up random crap. But that's still not verifyin…

Actually did you see the link on HN the other day? From somewhere like the Atlantic or something, which had the story about the attack on the UCSD team's effort to crowdsource-solve a DARPA challenge? Like the whole time they thought it was a sprawling 4chan raid, but it turned out to just be this one dude and his other friend that happened to be around that day. Proof positive that it only takes one determined attac…

No I hadn't seen that but it sounds unfortunate =/

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

#165

Post by yitchelle »

hocuspocus wrote: post #61

> Please use US dollars, thanks! Free currency converter http://www.xe.com/ Ah, too late. And I don't think that's a good idea. Exchange rates vary. Comparing within a country/region/city makes a lot more sense than across the world. Let people input their salary in the local currency.

Agreed, I would seconded the suggestion to keep it to the currency of the country that you are from. This helps the comparison to be more realistic.

Ie, if I want to compared my salary in two months in the future to the data that is entered today, the comparison is not useful or accurate due to the moving currency exchange rate.

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

#166

Post by yitchelle »

walshemj wrote: post #62
Tharkun wrote: post #5

Very US centric. No currency field? Not everyone expresses wages in amount/year. Are these amounts before tax? After tax?

I think most professional Salaried jobs quote salary per year.

Not so true in Europe. There are quite a significant number of countries where it is normal to specify a monthly wage rather than a yearly salary. Germany being one of them.

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

#167

Post by Gratsby »

negrit wrote: post #152
Gratsby wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. At first glance, I didn't think that part of the data was relevant to me, but I found myself digging into companies that I had experience with and their h1/green card ratios and how many h1 were in place. There are definite cultural differences between companies that seem to come through in the numbers. I did find a few that have their numbers somewhat hidden - with different company names that you wouldn't sea…

Out of curiosity could you define spammy? People call Glassdoor spammy, is it because there is too much advertising or because they force user to register in order to see more data?

The advertising I don't see (adblocker), but when you do provide them information they push for more and more and constantly harass you via email. Also, they force you to register after browsing the site a few times and do the hidden content thing pretending to have more content than they do. ("Register to read the full review", then when you register and go to the review it's like 4 words long).

I understand wanting some more input and encouraging users to provide it, but they take it too far.

The way you have it set up with a pretty easy way to search the data along with some posts that highlight some interesting aspects of the data appeals to me a good deal more. I should have known by the site name, but I didn't know there was an actual job board at jobsintech.com until the 3rd or 4th time I visited.

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

#168

Post by cptn_brittish »

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…

It made me shaky if I had to share my Company's name as I am in a similar position to you where there are only 6 people at the company and I'm in a easily identifiable position there. Currently that is optional so I put as much detail as I could about my position without giving away any company details.

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

#169

Post by cptn_brittish »

buro9 wrote: post #29

Needs: 1) A currency field to make this globally applicable. 2) Clarification text that salaries are gross, not net. 3) Ability to select some base benefits: health, eye, dental, travel costs, etc

And a search tool so that you can compare salary's in your own field.

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

#170

Post by chongli »

sosuke wrote: post #150

If I were making a good deal more than my peer what do I gain by being fair and honest. What makes it fair? Why shouldn't I make more or less by the skill of negotiation? I've not yet read a reason for the top paid people to talk about their salary. It seems they would have more to risk than gain and it would hurt them in the next negotiation. Not having spoken about my salary I've got no idea if I make more or less.…

If you want to see how it works in practice, just look at a pro sports league such as MLB. Everybody's salaries are out in the open and the players use this information, with solidarity, as a key component of their collective bargaining process. Though the top players make many times the minimum salary, they still participate and work hard as union reps advocating for all players, even those making the minimum.

Now, I'm not saying this website will function anything like a union but by sharing salary information everybody can work together for greater fairness for all.

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