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Compare Tech Salaries Instantly: Introducing the VanHack Tech Salary Calculator

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Re: Compare Tech Salaries Instantly: Introducing the VanHack Tech Salary Calculator

#12

Post by nrki »

iratewizard wrote: post #11

Why is blog spam like this consistently getting close to the top of HN? It's a brand new account pushing an email harvester "marketing" page with a flimsy excuse for interesting content.

I agree. It's not the link to the tool. And the tool doesn't even work.

Re: Compare Tech Salaries Instantly: Introducing the VanHack Tech Salary Calculator

#13

Post by PragmaticPulp »

JavaBatman wrote: post #5

There should be a legal requirement for companies to publicly post the salary band for every role. Otherwise, how do employees know where to start negotiations? This opaqueness only helps the employer, who already has much more leverage. Price assymetry goes against free market principles. The price of labor is like any other price of a good or service. People should know how much something costs before buying.

Public institutions do this in a lot of places. Apply for a job at a state University or other state-run institution and depending on where you live you might be able to look up the exact salaries of everyone who works there, including your future boss and coworkers.

Sounds great, but it doesn't really work out in favor of higher salaries. It becomes too easy for hiring managers to say "that's the salary band, can't go any higher". A lot of people hate negotiating and accept it as-is. Compensation at these institutions tends to be lower than what you get elsewhere, not higher.

The real negotiation just gets moved to a different discussion: If you say you need $150K but the salary band for the job listing is $100-120K, you can try to get them to create a separate, new opening at the higher salary band. Or they might already have multiple job openings at different salary bands and they'll quickly switch you to the other opening in the system, which doesn't actually change much at all from the hiring perspective.

Re: Compare Tech Salaries Instantly: Introducing the VanHack Tech Salary Calculator

#15

Post by capableweb »

Not sure how accurate this is? Clicking on the "Compare All" next to "Skills" shows $165k (per year?) for "Customer Service" and $200k for "Blockchain Technologies" which sounds like huge outliers, even though Blockchain jobs usually do pay a lot right now.

https://vanhack.com/tech-salary-calculator?contract=&role=&l...

Re: Compare Tech Salaries Instantly: Introducing the VanHack Tech Salary Calculator

#16

Post by sailfast »

JavaBatman wrote: post #5

There should be a legal requirement for companies to publicly post the salary band for every role. Otherwise, how do employees know where to start negotiations? This opaqueness only helps the employer, who already has much more leverage. Price assymetry goes against free market principles. The price of labor is like any other price of a good or service. People should know how much something costs before buying.

This is already law in Colorado. From what I’ve seen, however, folks are only required to post the base salary, not the whole band. Either way employers likely end up posting the widest band possible for all positions, so the data may not be super useful in terms of offers signed.

Re: Compare Tech Salaries Instantly: Introducing the VanHack Tech Salary Calculator

#19

Post by rmellow »

This has very little data, to the point it's unreliable.

"Data Scientists in the USA" gives: No data available.

"Data Scientists in Canada" has:

- Sample size = 1

- Not in a major city (Saskatoon)

- That single data point is not representative either, it's on the very low end of the distribution.

This calculator is doing Canadian data scientists a disservice by misinforming companies on salary ranges.

It's not the only one that publishes lowball estimates for Data Scientists either, Glassdoor does the same, and I suspect others do as well. My personal guess at what happens is that at higher ranges, individuals are not willing to publish their data.

If you need to estimate salaries for Canadian Data Scientists, Levels.fyi has much more sensible data (and a larger sample): https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Data-Scientist/Canada/

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