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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

#141
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:…

Amusingly, I had exactly the same idea and registered a domain intending to create a site doing this as well. I then promptly kept working on my day job until 4am, so haven't done a thing with it.

I like your implementation. To everyone asking about context, I believe this tool is intended to be used when you have already created such context, where coworkers want to know group salary information while still protecting their personal information from each other.

I had imagined the use would be where people were already in a group and wanted to share information anonymously. I had a brief moment before I fell asleep wondering how to prevent someone from just reloading the page as others submitted their salary information, thus being able to know what salary mapped to what user by the order they show up. I see that you set a minimum limit on the number of users in a pool, have you addressed this once the pool grows beyond that size?

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

#144

Perhaps make a public version that asks for more information and automatically generate pools when enough have submitted data for a particular segment (company, location, title, years experience, degree, etc)

That very quickly removes anonymity. I might be the only guy whose title is actually Software Developer - but we're a company with eight employees, five of whom I can see if I swivel my head.

I haven't thought about this problem extensively, but it seems you could maintain anonymity by hiding results for segments with a small number of responses. That's basically what this is doing, except the "segments" are user-defined and private.

If I'm the only one at my company who has responded then a search for my company won't turn up anything. If a dozen other people have then it will. If only one of those has the same job title then it if I search for my company and my job title nothing will show up. If 8 have the same job title then they will show up. Restricting it to one "axis" might solve that but the data would be less interesting.

Of course you have to be careful since certain combinations of searches could also reveal information (kind of like those logic questions: Sally is taller than Bob, Bob is shorter than Joe, etc, etc. Who is tallest?)

Excluding the company name and restricting location searches to large enough regions would remove a lot of the risk. It would be cool to be able to ask questions like "What are the salaries of software engineers with 5 years experience in Silicon Valley?" or "How much does having a BS degree increase your salary? MS degree? PhD?" or "How do salaries scale with # years experience?"

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you be okay with the cert provided by webfaction (where the site is hosted?), for now? https://salaryshare.me

Firefox throws an untrusted connection warning that this certificate belongs to another website.

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

#150

PHP NYC - http://salaryshare.me/f2864ef79da8296c035b2906c0bb4846

Design flaw there. I am tempted to just put in some random numbers so I can see the output.

Right. It would be nice to have a 'just let me see the results' link
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