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Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

salaryshare.me

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Re: Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

#61

Post by SimonPStevens »

donohoe wrote: post #11
rglullis wrote: post #2

After the discussion yesterday about how hard it is to know if your salary is comparable to your co-workers, and inspired by nostromo's "trick" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439443 ), I decided to implement a website where everyone can compare notes, without having to disclose personal info. It works by creating "salary pools". When you create a pool you get an unguessable URL (e.g, I created a pool at http:…

Without context, salary is meaningless. You should ask for title and years experience in the role. Without that a comparison is tough.

The way I see it is that you create the context yourself. You create a pool and only share the URL with people in a known context (such as your colleagues at work). That way you all get to discover where you are in the spread of your team, but without knowing which salary is tied to which individual.

Obviously, how you structure the context defines what it means to you. If you share it with everyone from managers to newbie graduates your context will be different than if you just share it with people you consider to be at the same level as you.

Re: Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

#63

Post by SimonPStevens »

landhar wrote: post #57

Good idea. Here's a suggestion, the numbers on the list should match a rank, eg: 1. $10 1. $10 3. $8 4. $7 4. $7 4. $7 7. $2 This will make it more relevant when looking how high up on the list your annual salary is. Edit: fixed formatting. Edit2: corrected the ranking as suggested by SimonPStevens

Shouldn't that be: 1. $10 1. $10 3. $8

The way I see it, the person with $8 is ranked third, not second.

Think of what would happen if you extended it. If you had 99 people earning $10 and 1 earning $8, it would be misleading to rank that bottom individual 2nd.

Re: Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

#64

Post by arctangent »

timrobinson wrote: post #50
arctangent wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some larger companies have offices in more than one country. Examples would be Google, Microsoft, Facebook, most banks, etc. Perhaps it would be useful to be able to view the results in any currency you desired. But already we're entering scope-creep territory :-)

Right - if you cared enough about looking at anonymous salary information across different countries, you could just use Glassdoor.com.

The point of this app is that you share a link with your peers, whether they're based in your office or in an office in a different country. This is a bit different from completely anonymised data from statistically similar market segments (and possibly more useful, since people at the same company are likely to have similar perks and benefits etc.)

Re: Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

#65

Post by Sukotto »

Cushman wrote: post #34
Sukotto wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so sad that some trolling assholes will try to poison cool projects like this by entering extremely high or low numbers. $33million? $123? $0 ... sheesh. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

One of those $0s is mine. I'm an unemployed college student; it should probably be more like -$20,000. Just sayin'.

If you are unemployed or self-employed then the question isn't really for you (though the answers certainly are).

You're not acting in your own best interest.

If you accept that the site's trying to give you ammunition in the form of more accurate information. Then you hurt yourself (and everyone else) by putting in an absurdly high or low number you skew the results away from the actual market value.

If it skews high, you're going to miss out on opportunities by holding out for an unrealistically high compensation.

If it skews low, you accept less money.

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