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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

#111

Post by Dove »

Sukotto wrote: post #65
Cushman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hig…

You're not acting in your own best interest.

No, he misunderstood the goal of the exercise. I'd argue it's not entirely his fault, either. "What's your salary" -- asked as a general question, without further context, justifiably might not be taken that literally. (And there is no further context unless you've read the previous thread. The post here, and salaryshare.me, don't say anything that indicates this isn't a simple income poll.)

This is not a stupid or malicious user. This is a UI failure.

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

#112

Post by Dove »

Cushman wrote: post #109
pavel_lishin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are unemployed; therefore you have no salary. This is somewhat akin to placing "yes, please" under the "sex" column of a questionaire.

I'm not sure I understand— how does the fact that I'm unemployed, and therefore have no salary, negate the fact that I have no salary? Are you trying to distinguish between "no salary" and "$0 salary"? They feel pretty equivalent to me. Again, this is an informal salary pool for HN users. I'm an HN user, and my yearly income, taking into consideration my no stock options, no bonuses, no salary, and no other non-salar…

Actually, yes, it is irrelevant, and yes, you don't understand. But it's not your fault. :P You're missing some context: this is a followon to a previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438980

The idea isn't to see how much other hackers are making in general. The idea is to see how much companies are paying them, so that people who are being paid much less or more than they're worth can figure that out.

Granted, it's a pretty statistically silly way to go about that given the breadth of HN readership. The posts further down the thread ("PHP Programmers in Baltimore") make more sense.

Not your fault, though. UI guys like to beat up users when they screw up. Don't listen to 'em. You are giving them valuable, valuable information.

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

#113

Post by rickmode »

Has any tech company used fully disclosed salaries as described in Mavrick [1][2]? It's an intriguing idea.

Mavrick describes how all salaries were publicly posted. People see exactly where they are in relation to others. Of course this created tension at first, but eventually things settled. The magic happens during hiring. An open position's salary is also public, and everyone on an interview panel naturally ranks candidates versus current employees. Is the candidate better than Joe? She better be because she'll be making more than Joe.

Has anyone heard of a tech company doing something like this?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book)

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

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

#114

Post by pluies »

IgorPartola wrote: post #42
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:…

One small issue: https://salaryshare.me/ does not work. Considering who this is targeted at, I wouldn't want my office mates who are my co-workers to snoop on my POST to your site. Kind of defeats the purpose.

Do your coworkers routinely sniff your network traffic?

It sounds like an awfully rude thing to do.

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

#116

Post by Retric »

btrask wrote: post #102
landhar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are absolutely right, that was more what I was thinking about when I wrote that. I just edited it to match with your proposal.

For what it's worth, this is quite easy to compute in a way that works with any number of ties, and doesn't require computing the whole list in order. Your rank is the number of people above you plus one.

I must be missing something. That's a N^2 operation on an unsorted list. ~N Log N if you sort it first. And N to insert a new entry to a sorted list.

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

#117

Post by IgorPartola »

pluies wrote: post #114
IgorPartola wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small issue: https://salaryshare.me/ does not work. Considering who this is targeted at, I wouldn't want my office mates who are my co-workers to snoop on my POST to your site. Kind of defeats the purpose.

Do your coworkers routinely sniff your network traffic? It sounds like an awfully rude thing to do.

I don't think so, but why put them in a position where they'd be tempted? If I send out a link to the salary share pool on our internal chat, the assumption is that at least some people will go filling it out around that time. If someone gets the temptation to know exactly what's going on, they could start up a packet sniffer. OTOH, a StartSSL cert would prevent all of this from happening.
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