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Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

honestsalary.com

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Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#71

Post by anuj_nm »

nhumrich wrote: post #69

Am I the only one that feels shaky sharing my salary? I work at a start up and if I share my position and company it won't really be anonymous, as I am the only person at the company with that position. I do agree its nice for people to post their salaries so i know if I'm underpaid. But what if I'm overpaid, or at least played more than most at my company? What will that do to people I work with who find or how much…

Maybe you can add some details about what stage your company is at (seed vs Series A/B/C), instead of identifying your company?

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#72

Post by lokeshk »

nhumrich wrote: post #69

Am I the only one that feels shaky sharing my salary? I work at a start up and if I share my position and company it won't really be anonymous, as I am the only person at the company with that position. I do agree its nice for people to post their salaries so i know if I'm underpaid. But what if I'm overpaid, or at least played more than most at my company? What will that do to people I work with who find or how much…

You can just mention "A startup in XY technology located in bay area", and hopefully that would be enough to give you ambiguity.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#73

Post by golergka »

CydeWeys wrote: post #34
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #13

Just posted this to the other discussion, but it bears just the same. This is just going to be a collection of anecdotes from people who self-select to report because they feel good about where they're at, or because they feel righteously justified in complaining about their situation. Self-selection ruins the data. The responses have to be random to be useful. And the silly thing is that most people who are involved…

My company had a similar spreadsheet internally that was self-selected and it was incredibly useful. I found that I had come in at the low range for my pay band and got a $10K raise in the next annual salary review. It's anonymous. I'm not sure why you think it'd be so susceptible to bragging or complaining. A lot of people, me included, are data nerds, and will contribute to the dataset regardless of our personal si…

> It's anonymous. I'm not sure why you think it'd be so susceptible to bragging or complaining.

Because people are irrational by their nature, and it takes a lot of effort to eliminate such factors when you make a decision.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#74

Post by jdavis703 »

coldtea wrote: post #35
transman wrote: post #17

As a transgender person, I won't fill it out unless I have the option to opt out of gender identification or select "other" for gender. I'm not alone. http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sd/news_article/1... http://www.autostraddle.com/facebook-wants-you-to-do-you-add...

There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet. Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor? Heck, I'm a male, but often put female in forms, just to not give marketeers my info...

Yes, in this context it's extremely important. It's well accepted there's a pay gap between males and females. However there are also discrimination and pay differences for people who associate with non-cys gender identities. If you're going to expose wage information, it's important that it's done so not only in the name of efficient markets, but also in terms of social equality.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#75

Post by JackC »

coldtea wrote: post #35
transman wrote: post #17

As a transgender person, I won't fill it out unless I have the option to opt out of gender identification or select "other" for gender. I'm not alone. http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sd/news_article/1... http://www.autostraddle.com/facebook-wants-you-to-do-you-add...

There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet. Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor? Heck, I'm a male, but often put female in forms, just to not give marketeers my info...

> Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor?

This is how Show HN works. Someone makes a thing -- a form to collect data. Someone else finds that it's missing options they would find useful, so they offer a suggestion with supporting links to explain why the missing stuff would be useful. Now the form can be improved. High fives all around.

> There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet.

There are millions of everything on the internet. But it's hard to find successful sites with mandatory gender fields and only two options, because that alienates users for no reason, and alienating users for no reason isn't what successful sites do.

Think about it this way: you might choose "female" sometimes to mess with marketers, but "male" is still an option. If you were filling out a form and the only options were "female over 35" and "female under 35," do you think that might tend to discourage male responses?

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#76

Post by coldtea »

nck4222 wrote: post #41
coldtea wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not actually that bad. First, even in your version, the "feel goods" (high salaries) and the "complainers" (low salaries) would cancel each other out, and (assuming equal numbers of them) will give us a usable median value. But in the real world is more complicated than "self-selection" in the basic mode you describe. Who might "feel good" and who might feel "justified in complaining" will not be so much based o…

(which we can assume are evenly distributed among salaries). Why would you assume that? To me it seems the opposite, that they wouldn't be evenly distributed.

I mean the personalities. I don't think being a "complainer" vs a "feel gooder" personality type changes much based on salary.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#78

Post by [deleted] »

xofer wrote: post #64

The assumption here is that salary is set by forces beyond the employee's control, and it's either fair or unfair. I would argue that everyone's salary is fair, b/c it's set at what the employee negotiated for. If you accepted a salary offer as-is, then that's what you get. If you feel your salary is unfair, then contact your boss and negotiate for more. I won't get into all the tactics of negotiation, but it works t…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#79

Post by lowboy »

DanBC wrote: post #39
coldtea wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet. Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor? Heck, I'm a male, but often put female in forms, just to not give marketeers my info...

It's a useful criticism. In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about gender reassignment. Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other", they should be able to tick "female".

> identifies as female

As a point of clarification, this should be "identifies as a woman". Sex (male/female) is a physical characteristic, gender (man/woman) is a social construct.

More info from transman's first link:

> Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#80

Post by MichaelDickens »

transman wrote: post #17

As a transgender person, I won't fill it out unless I have the option to opt out of gender identification or select "other" for gender. I'm not alone. http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sd/news_article/1... http://www.autostraddle.com/facebook-wants-you-to-do-you-add...

I definitely agree with you that surveys should always include an "other" option for gender, but I'm wondering why you don't want to fill it out otherwise? I'm guessing from your username that you're a man, so why don't you want to pick "male"?
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