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LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

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Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#31

Post by vostok »

mdorazio wrote: post #26
wdewind wrote: post #2

Self reported salaries are just never going to be a good data source. I was hoping since this was LinkedIn and they have tons of resources they'd be doing something different, but they don't seem to have made any progress on the many attempts people make each year to do salary analysis in this way. Anyone have any good ideas for actually gathering accurate salary data?

For tech work, you can use H1B salary data (from somewhere like http://h1bdata.info/ ) as a minimum level for a position. Scale up by some percentage (10-20% in my experience) to get the median for what US citizens are likely making in the same position.

The problem is that this only includes base salary.

Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#33

Post by vostok »

kbart wrote: post #7
hamandcheese wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What incentive do people have to lie about their salary (assuming it's anonymous)?

Not necessarily lie. People, that earn less, are likely to be ashamed (even anonymously) of their salary, while big earners are prone to boast on every occasion.

Empirically, we see the opposite happening and compensation data on websites like Glassdoor is actually too low.

Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#34

Post by ones_and_zeros »

twokul wrote: post #25
patcheudor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are massive incentives to lie about how much you make. It's not hard to imagine this tool will be used by HR compensation experts to determine wage parity. With that in mind, the higher the average, the better positioned you will be to negotiate a higher salary, therefore everyone who reports how much they make is ultimately incentivized to state more than they make in hopes of driving up the wage index for the…

one of the engineers from Salary team. we talk about privacy and accuracy at length in this blog post https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar... . TL;DR; we do outlier detection.

Why didn't you buy industry standard employer wage reported surveys like any employer of size does? They are readily available and the cost would be a drop in a bucket for LNKD.

Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#35

Post by mswen »

Awhile back I reserved the domain developersalarybenchmarks.com

HR departments can purchase salary benchmarks from companies like Mercer. Everyone on the developers side would like better benchmarks that are free or nearly free to even the odds when negotiating job offers or raises from current employers.

I haven't created a site yet in part because of the self-reporting problems. Will developers trust an unknown start-up with their real salary data plus the education, skills, experience and location data needed to make this targeted and really valuable? Can we have a process that is sufficiently rigorous and accurate that HR departments would acknowledge it in negotiations? How can we prevent developers from inflating their current salaries and other compensation? How can we prevent companies from coming on the site and using bogus accounts to drive down salaries?

As someone else mentioned the guys at step.com - seem to have an interesting idea of having developers post the background and skills and then have people anonymously value that background. I suspect that this approach will also face issues of acceptance in negotiations.

Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#36

Post by twokul »

nsxwolf wrote: post #28
twokul wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the engineers from Salary team. we talk about privacy and accuracy at length in this blog post https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar... . TL;DR; we do outlier detection.

What's an outlier? I bet a lot of people feel they're shortchanged by about $10k, and will report that much higher to set a baseline. Outlier sounds more like "AngularJS developer making $250,000 in Cleveland"

it means more accurate baseline calculation as well as median salary which will rule out things like "AngularJS developer making $250,000 in Cleveland"

Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#37

Post by mabermoske »

wdewind wrote: post #2

Self reported salaries are just never going to be a good data source. I was hoping since this was LinkedIn and they have tons of resources they'd be doing something different, but they don't seem to have made any progress on the many attempts people make each year to do salary analysis in this way. Anyone have any good ideas for actually gathering accurate salary data?

I don't know how widely it's used, but it seems like LinkedIn could some how use Work Number [1] to allow people to verify their salary.

[1] https://www.theworknumber.com/

Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#39

Post by twokul »

allengeorge wrote: post #32

Hopefully LinkedIn won't ask me for my salary in the future. Cause I definitely don't trust them with my salary info. They'll sell it to everyone - recruiters, other companies...

I'd suggest you to read https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar..., the section about privacy.

Re: LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

#40

Post by ones_and_zeros »

mswen wrote: post #35

Awhile back I reserved the domain developersalarybenchmarks.com HR departments can purchase salary benchmarks from companies like Mercer. Everyone on the developers side would like better benchmarks that are free or nearly free to even the odds when negotiating job offers or raises from current employers. I haven't created a site yet in part because of the self-reporting problems. Will developers trust an unknown sta…

I've thought about this as well. Ultimately you need access to some pretty private data. One thought I've had is to use the mint/intuit APIs to get a list of a persons transactions in their bank account and find the ones that occur every 2 weeks, etc.

Or possibly have users upload paystubs, though you'd have to have someway to verify. I'm sure that's possible.

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