I have always felt certain anxiety when thinking about my salary and only guessing what my colleagues might be earning. This issue is especially problematic in cultures and countries in which talking about wage numbers is an unspoken taboo among the employees.
Quite often, the questions like “Should I ask for a raise?, or am I already earning maximum that my employer can handle?” “Am I earning too much for the work that I do?, or am I underpaid?” “Who should I look up to and learn what they are doing to get a higher salary?” have plagued my mind.
# Existing solutions:
Of course, there are services where you can look at salary levels or statistical distributions of wages. The problem with them is that they don’t give you specific (albeit anonymized) numbers of what individuals earn, and they don’t satisfy nagging feelings of fear and anxiety that I have mentioned above. Also, it’s hard to tell whether the numbers are up-to-date or not.
# The solution:
I designed this product to be privacy-first so that many more users feel comfortable sharing their wage information and keeping it up-to-date. It allows users to see all salary entries in their current company, search for other companies in preparation for negotiations. Here is the full list of features:
- I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles
- I nudge users to update their info twice a year
- I keep information quality high
- You keep your data anonymous
- You can see your and other companies data
- You can subscribe for updates for particular job titles/companies
# Plans for the next version:
I plan to allow users to share their non-anonymized information in an encrypted peer-to-peer fashion with each other if they want to. This answers the question like, “Oh, somebody earns twice as much as me… And has the same job title… Who is that?”
Tell me what you think about it! Is there something missing from your perspective?
I have trouble registering to your website. More specifically I opted for linkedin based registration but the process stops with a message that the password is weak although I use a couple of special characters, numbers and text in both lower and capital characters
Passwords are a terrible form of authentication anyway -- if it's something that actually matters, use some form of 2-factor auth.
Requiring a long password on a site where the impact of a breach is minimal is not a good policy, you're just going to get people who can't ever login.
While this sounds quite good on paper, I have a few questions:
- What kind of data are you storing about a user? You mention verification with LinkedIn but what happens if your database is compromised 6 months later and all data is accessed by a malicious 3rd party?
- When checking salaries, I prefer to search a job title and look at the average salary of a country, city, region or a company. Do you provide these features?
- I looked at the demo application and only thing I see is a table with some entries. Unfortunately, this is not very user friendly.
- I would want to see the average salary of a position
- Count of salary entries of a position
- Variance for the salary of a position (min, max, average, median)
- The way to success is to have a lot of salary entries in your database. As a newly established service owner, how do you plan to keep users with your service and providing updates rather than using glassdoor etc. competitors?
- How do you plan to monetize this service?
Please do not see my comments as offensive, I mean to ask honest questions and give criticism.
These are all great questions! Thank you for asking!
- For the data question, you can find all the information on our privacy policy in details (https://www.fellowage.io/privacy): what is stored, how it’s processed and for what reason, lawful basis, etc. Please read this about how I disassociate account information (and protect it) from raw pseudo-anonymized wage entries (that are already "public"—available to all users of the system via search): https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-privacy-an...
- I don’t provide these features right now. Currently, product solves slightly different problem, and I think it’s possible to expand its feature set to cover for search by job title/location, or company. You can already search by company/location though. (It’s a search bar at the top of the webapp’s UI).
- These are all features that show you statistical distributions, and while they are useful, there are plenty of tools that solve for that problem already. I set out to solve slightly different problem: “Who should I look up to in my company to earn more?” or “How up-to-date are specific salary entries?”
- I plan to notify my users to update their entries every half a year. Also, there are features that allow users to set up alerts for certain companies/locations/job-titles when there are new entries, or updates. These alerts are aggregated in a weekly report (if it’s not empty, of course).
- The current plan for monetization: there are two types of accounts: free and paid. Free account can view their own company/location without limitations, and for viewing of other companies/locations there are 3 monthly free views, that can be substantially and permanently boosted with referrals (similar to what Dropbox did with their referrals). Paid account has no limitations, of course.
Please tell me what you think about these replies! :)
Lost me right there. Good luck with that. LinkedIn is notoriously a garbage dump of spam, recruiters and fake profiles. That’s on top of the fact that most people (myself included) don’t have a LinkedIn profile to begin with in order to curb spam.
>>I have always felt certain anxiety when thinking about my salary and only guessing what my colleagues might be earning.<<
I can tell you that anxiety of not knowing is better than the anger/disappointment/a whole host of other destructive emotions after you do know. Companies don't want to deal with this. It can easily get ugly.
In my case, my boss'boss actually had the balls to tell me that he will not be terrorized by me suggesting there are greener pastures out there. Looking back it was a big mistake. Should have waited for an offer and then use this information.
>I plan to allow users to share their non-anonymized information in an encrypted peer-to-peer fashion with each other if they want to. This answers the question like, “Oh, somebody earns twice as much as me… And has the same job title… Who is that?”
Couldn't you find a bunch of people who are in that job title in your org? I'm sure with some detective work you could connect the dots on individuals you care to track down, depending on the size of the company.
Unfortunately, as there is no way to vet submitted information on these kinds of platforms, their use is pretty limited. Some employer can just go about submitting false salary data in order to appear more appealing.
This works the other way around too, someone who was not hired, some ex-employee with some gripe against their previous employer, a misbehaving competitor... Just about anyone can go about submitting false reviews about your company in order to damage your employer-brand.
I've heard of places where HR requires you to write a (probably) glowing Glassdoor review during onboarding. Or severance which is conditioned on not writing a negative review.
I think what GP means is that the employer gives X to current employees, but makes false posts on this website, that claims there are employees that make 0.7X. Then when you interview with the employer, they offer you X, and you think you are being offered 30% more than your future co-workers, so you happily take the job.
Can you enforce a threshold of entries for a certain role after which you start displaying the salary? And then only display it as a range with information about the quartiles?
Otherwise it‘s not so anonymous. Sometimes the combination of role and Salary is enough to point to a single employee. That’s precisely the reason why you only get statistical information at the other sites.
If I apply replace entries with statistical ranges, then the product would become a clone of other products for this (like Glasdoor, LinkedIn Salary, etc.). And it won’t solve the problems I set out to solve with it anymore.
As far as I know, Glassdoor shows only averages and statistical distributions and doesn’t show separate salary entries. It doesn’t satisfy the questions and fears that I have set out to solve.
e.g., “Who should I look up to in my company to earn more?” or “How up-to-date are specific salary entries?”
My product doesn’t answer the first question just yet, but it will in the future via a peer-to-peer sharing feature that I’m planning in the next version.
Maybe. So what? There are many Ubers, AirBnBs, Googles, etc. Diversity and competition is very valuable for consumers. It keeps innovation moving forward, so I really don’t see your point here.
It is ironic, how on a post about a website that encourages competition at the employer level for providing fair wages, people are complaining that they don't need competition at the meta-level (salary-sharing websites level).
I appreciate the focus on security with your multi-layered password feature, but I just clicked out of your tab because none of my passwords are 'secure' enough for you.
There was a problem with some special characters (they were not included in validation), and password manager would generate a password that is pretty good, but doesn’t have special characters I’ve initially chosen.
Now, I’m including most special characters, so it should work.
PS: Also, the pre-flight validation now includes special character check too, so you can see the validity real-time instead of after you submit. (This check was not originally included on the client-side, only on the server).
I like this idea and hope it gains ground. A thing to think about is to work with ranges, in terms of showing a person how much other people earn. I can imagine the system exposing someone at the same level in a relatively small department that they shared such kind of info on your website (if user A simply says but user B earn so much) so any way to "obfuscate" the data would protect everyone.
About distributed companies, do you think an option to enter "Distributed Company" in the location is a good solution for this problem? Then, what happens if company pays vastly differently depending on the country/city?
About currency: It works, when you type the currency, you need to select the entry from the auto-complete. I’m thinking about making it select the currency automatically if only one option matches.
I think this should be more "local". I.e. usually I want to know my direct coworkers salary, not necessarily some nation- or corporationwide statistic.
Maybe an app where you scan some QR code, that somebody randomly puts in your break room or so...
I never understood the kind of culture where salaries are secret. How good is that? In academia you know exactly how much everybody earns (it's determined by your tenure status) and nobody makes a fuss about it.
I've also found that the "taboo" against discussing salaries is a very weak taboo. If you make the first move, and talk about your salary, many people will relax and reciprocate.
It's only a taboo to the extent that other people are vaguely worried that it might be. :-)
Turns out you answered your own question in the sentence after you asked it.
You don't ever want your pay tied to seniority. You want it based on the value you can deliver. That way, you with your 10 years of experience and proven ability to ship good products get to make twice as much as Senior Dev John with 10 years experience maintaining the internal CRUD app.
And then you have a company that wants to keep salaries secret, so they don't have to keep hiring a new person to maintain their internal CRUD app every every 6 months.
I’m pretty sure that there are enough people who would be content with such a simple job of maintaining CRUD app. They get less salary, yes, but also they’ll have much less stress, and can focus their energy on other things.
It suggests that I hate self-righteous people who present their own views as universal facts about what absolutely can and cannot be done. I think this is how the space of everyone's freedom is steadily retreating, and I'm sick of it.
On the other hand, your comment suggests that you are someone who tries to win a discussion by clumsily insulting his opponent.
I apologize. Obvious sarcasm blew right over my head and I need to hurry up and stop pretending. I feel like my effective IQ right now is between 90 and 100 at best. The supposed reasons for that are all wrapped up in Facebook drama (minus Facebook) and totally off-topic.
I think that we do partly agree on a thing. The way so many are-- as I like to put it-- running massive marketing campaigns to define and redefine "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is pretty horrible. We probably don't agree on which definitions should stick or fall away, but that's off topic, too.
"Is that an accident" was not entirely meant to be the accusing rhetorical question that it seems like now. It's also, what's your angle? And you answered that.
P.S. (hating people with stupid views) < (hating their stupid views)
I'm not policing anything. If we've dumbed down to the point where opinions have to be prefaced with the tautological "it's my opinion that..." that's probably something that 90% of posters here should be informed of.
As to your personal freedom to make light of an industry that commercialises the destruction of young lives, I have no interest in that discussion so I refrain from commenting.
2. How do you get enough data points to be useful?
3. How do you account for selection bias?
4., (and here's the big one) how do you account for the mistruths of self-reported income?
The last one is the big problem with all self-reported income summaries. One thing I've learned over the year is that people lie, even anonymously. I'm not even sure why. Do they really believe it? Are they posting it to make themselves feel good? I really don't know. But I do know that I don't believe your salary claim until I see a W2.
As for selection bias, this is a big one too. Take a company like Google. At level 7+ data point get pretty thin. This is partially because there aren't that many but the real problem is that these people really have no motivation to share. So you don't really see the big outliers.
Lastly, most of these aren't clear on what number they are report and what users should report. Is it base salary? What about bonus? What about RSUs/options?
As anyone who has worked in big tech knows, base salary number are almost completely useless. Salary band is defined by level (pretty tightly, in my experience). More than 50% of your total compensation will come from bonus and stock and stock in particular has massive variance.
Does question #1 really need to be asked? Glassdoor has lost its impartiality through solicitation of corporate money and influence, and imo can no longer be trusted. The scene is ripe for competition now.
We had a Glassdoor sales guy contact HR after a negative review to sell us a paid option to "improve" our profile. My trust in them since then is below zero.
I, like you, used to flippantly accuse Yelp of extortion. It’s always easy to believe the worst. Then someone here on HN provided several helpful articles that gave me pause and helped me update my point of view.
That page would be much more convincing, if it listed out what had Yelp done for local businesses in exchange for money. In modern corporate PR, most of the useful information is in what is not said.
I have a few friends who own restaurants. Yelp extortion is real. i've seen it myself. Yelp denying it is obvious, who'd admit to it?
They do not "manipulate" ratings, sure... They just take a looong time to "Review" positive reviews, and not too long to "Review" negative reviews you get. And, of course, only reviews they have "reviewed can be shown and count towards your average score...
>All these claims are publicly testable using web archives
I'm confused about how you think this would work.
1. Yelp doesn't report on its approval speed.
2. To get an accurate report on this, you would have to have several accounts posting positive and negative reviews on the same pages. Yelp doesn't allow this and would ban the accounts.
3. Yelp explicitly disallows scraping their site (i.e. having a bot archive the pages). Doing so would be thwarted by their anti-bot measures. It's also against their TOS.[0]
Do you have web archives that can be used to build these stats?
There are endlesss stories of yelp extortion from so so mamy independent sources. That yelp needs a top level page to address this is proof enough. There is zero amount of corporate speak from Yelp that would change my mind.
A former company I worked at easily and quickly was able to have Glassdoor remove a post from a disgruntled former employee that revealed some private information about the company (sales numbers or something).
To be clear, I don’t really trust Glassdoor that much either, but I think more details are warranted here. If you can alter the reviews by hiding them or changing the ranking algorithm, that’s basically fraud. On the other hand, if only paid company accounts can get access to additional analytics / reporting, have the ability to respond inline to reviews, add additional info to the company profile, etc, then that’s less problematic.
This is a disgusting business model. If any of my products (that are in similar domain) succeeds, I’ll never turn to this model!
Also, I hate ads too.
For this business domain, that leaves a business model where "power users" of the product can get more features, or more access, or more detailed data for a premium fee.
Are there even more alternatives? What do you think?
If you base 50% of your salary on options you are getting screwed because I have been given options every job and literally haven't gotten 1 cent because of the exercise window and investors getting preferred stocks. At this point I just say give me the cash.
Options in a startup are one thing (and most likely will be worth $0). Options in a big tech company are something else entirely. Granted big tech companies these days pretty much all do RSUs but Google, for example, did options up until 2008 or so.
So this is what I'm talking about when I say that non-salary compensation can easily eclipse your salary at a big tech company.
(This will be flagged for offending sensibilities, not because it's untrue. (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/13/study-black-employees-get-lo...) Negotiating from the position of someone who the hiring manager doesn't believe has room to negotiate negatively impacts your final offer.)
No one here is getting offended by words on a website. If it gets flagged, it's because it's a veiled attempt to derail the original discussion completely.
Discussing voting/flagging is a violation of the site guidelines, which is itself enough of a reason to flag this.
But it's an irrelevant and juvenile point anyway, because it's not something you can change. Negotiation tactics, BATNA, etc are all things you can influence. Your race or how the hiring manager perceives it are not.
No, it's untrue. Not that white men get paid more--that's true--but that it's an option. I can choose to improve my negotiation skills and my BATNA, so those are options. If you aren't already a white man, being a white man is not an option for you. We're talking about what our effective options are and that's just not one of them.
(Regardless of whether gender transitions count as a choosing to become a man, I don't think it would do much to boost income in our current society.)
Why does this need to be an acronym? Seems like a convoluted way to say one should know their second best option when negotiating, but that seems like an obvious thing even a 5 year old knows.
1. Shows you separate entries (pseudo-anonymized) instead of showing statistical numbers like averages and spreads.
2. By requiring users to share their wage information at signup. The idea is that to see salaries of others you need to share yours first. It’s possible to delete wage entry later, but also that makes the user lose access to others, until they either: add wage entry again or upgrade to paid account plan.
3. Yes, I agree that certain folks will have no motivation to share, because they don’t care to know what others ("below" their level) earn. What could be interesting for them is what others of the same or similar level earn. So maybe something like peer-to-peer sharing may be interesting to these folk.
4. We’re going to implement an algorithm that will try to detect "suspicious" data entries, and devise some a more advanced validation mechanism. Such entries will be hidden from other users in the meantime.
So there are two fields: core wage (this is what you get no matter what), and other benefits estimate (here you just bundle everything else, and for non-deterministic stuff, make your best estimate, of what it’s worth).
"More than 50% come from bonus or stock, or others" is actually not quite true in every culture or country. For what I’ve seen here in Germany and in few other countries, 90% or even more is the base salary.
> By requiring users to share their wage information at signup
This seems like a bad idea. Aren't you concerned this will lower the quality and accuracy of submissions? I know when some website forces me to put in details I don't think it needs I put in garbage.
Also you're asking people to submit data when they have no idea what data you already have. Are they first to submit?
This reminds me of Auto generated pages with no content or no answer yet that's not clear from a Google SERP. You get the "helpful" message like "be the first to post X". I actually wish Google would downrank questions with no answers and empty wiki pages.
It smacks of clickbait is what I'm getting at. If you measure it you'll probably find your bounce rate is really high.
Yes, we don’t have too much data yet. All the data is crowdsourced.
I validate the information (current job title, company name and location) via user’s LinkedIn profile manually.
I don’t validate the "numbers", but I plan to implement an algorithm that’ll mark "suspicious" entries, and will hide them or delete them from the system. Additionally, owners of such records will be prompted to update them when they log in into the system next time.
Glassdoor under-reports salaries because unhappy people are overrepresented there. Unhappy people are likely to be underpaid compared to their happy peers. Anything that helps us gather data relevant to negotiations and eliminate the salary-sharing stigma is a good step forward.
> people lie, even anonymously
People lie about taboos. If salary sharing becomes commonplace, they might feel compelled to tell the truth.
>Even a website operator, with direct access to the database, can’t see who is the owner of your salary entry.
I'm curious about this given you can update/delete your salary entry - does there not have to be a unique identifier between the account and the entry?
As lots of commenters mentioned, this is a nice try, but human (and corporate) nature dooms it.
The only way to make this kind of thing work, is to legislate salary transparency.
That may seem to disincentivize individual excellence (by removing the rewards), but I'd say that it's OK to pay Bob more than Joe, as long as you are willing to justify that increase in wages. As a manager, I had to fight like hell to get promotions and increases for my team, so I always had this information handy.
The other way to incentivize excellence and effort is through bonuses, but these could easily become opaque, thus, continuing the issue.
In academia, salaries tend to be [relatively] low, so perks become the currency.
Human nature dictates that we always want to be "better than" our peers (thus making them "not-peers"). We always seem to find ways to do end-runs around the system.
I'm fairly glad to be out of the corporate rat-race. I'm doing my own thing, making less than I ever have, and loving every minute of it.
Legislating salary transparency would be quite awesome actually. And as others have pointed out, in some countries you can call tax office and ask how much another person has earned in the last year.
And I do believe that every company needs to get very transparent on how they decide the salary, when they pay someone differently. There should be a well-designed set of rules and processes to follow. This way, people who want to earn more, know exactly what to do and in which direction should they grow and develop. Also, if they think that this direction doesn’t align with their personal goals, they can make a better decision about joining another company, where interests will align better.
> Legislating salary transparency would be quite awesome actually.
I've heard they do this in one or more Scandinavian countries. Essentially, you can go online and see what your coworkers and neighbors earn.
I have a feeling that's why salaries in these countries, especially when you include state defined insurance and pension plans, are so normalized. It's probably also why more innovation tends to take place in the US (subjectively).
For many of us in the US, I think this would actually be a net negative, myself included. There is so much division in this country, eventually employers will simply be forced to dish out nearly identical salaries for everyone in order to avoid lawsuits and government penalties, even when talent and performance is radically different between employees.
For example, Employee X has a BS in CS from a great engineering school which took a lot of effort to obtain. He was hacking away at code on his own as a teenager and is passionate about tech, and is often working on open source projects on weekends and evenings.
Another employee comes in - she got a watered-down "Information Systems" degree from some mediocre pay-to-play online school, and her previous knowledge of technology is her IPhone and Facebook. She pays her tutition fees, does the minimum to graduate, and now has her BS, too.
She discovers the talented guy make 50% more than her, even though he's the guy leading the development projects, ensuring standards are met, cleaning up the garbage produced by other junior coders, etc. We all know that many teams form this dynamic, especially in typical contracting and enterprise shops.
Well of course she'll complain. They both have similar 'credentials' on paper, both work 40 hours, both are in their 30s. Management won't care that one dev is worth 5x the other, they want to avoid lawsuits and government penalties. So his salary is lowered, hers is raised. Because he knows he won't get paid what he's worth anywhere else since it's the same everywhere, he just stop performing at work, the whole project suffers.
And yes, this has happened in my work place several times in the last few years as salaries have become more transparent and there are more complaints from groups who feel that they're being discriminated against, regardless of their performance and experience.
You are correct, which is why I think a bonus system would work better.
The problem with bonuses, is that they are very easy to abuse, and many corporations have incredibly rigid bonus systems that actually make it difficult to reward individual excellence.
I was just talking with a friend of mine a couple of days ago. He's a Director at a manufacturing plant, and is awesome.
He spent the last year, working 7 days a week, ten hours a day, to implement some new processes. The company is being put out to bid for sale, and his efforts doubled the price.
His efforts alone.
Doubled the price of the company.
He got a tiny raise, and all Directors get the same bonus, based on sales numbers (which weren't so good). Also, all Directors get the same percentage of equity.
I suspect that he may be seeing who else could use his talents...
Working that hard for someone else is stupid. Unless you hold the reins, I wouldn't expect management to suddenly have their hearts grow 10 times larger at the expense of their own compensation.
I agree with this. No matter how much I love the company, their mission, or people I work with, it’s not healthy to work 7 days a week and 10h a day for the company that you are not an owner of. Boundaries between job and life are flexible, but not as much.
I’d rather spend 10h a day 7 days a week pouring efforts into my own assets, or towards my vision, and not for someone else’s assets or vision, especially if I have no say and stake in the high level decisions (like sale of the company).
I would have assumed that the person learning on their own, working on open source projects, and hacking away on stuff since they were a kid went to the mediocre school. They just need the paper to open the gates.
The person who went to the "top-tier" school is more likely to be working the system and generally turning in garbage at work. Their parents have a buddy on the board, or the department is run by a frat/sorority acquaintance, or they just get extra consideration because "top-tier" school resume.
An yes, I've seen this at many places over the years... Guess who the first whiner is?
If you plan to go global don´t repeat glassdoor mistake (or is it on purpose?). In countries where inflation rate is big (like 30-50% a year) salary info that is not tied to the date the worker was perceiving it, its mostly useless. Same happens with average salary reports, etc.
I’m keeping and showing how old the entry is. Additionally, I plan to notify users to update their information every half a year, since their last update. If they don’t update in one year, I plan to hide, or remove their information automatically.
Are you using some type of adblocker that blocks cookie banners?
I have coded my own cookie banner and didn’t use any of the existing tools out there. That’s why I’m surprised if something is blocking it, but there was already another comment about the same as well.
This is to be honest, weird thing for adblocker to do—to block legitimate cookie banner.
And yes, website is not going to work until the required cookie is accepted (my backend rejects requests when they don’t specify that the necessary cookie consent was given).
No third-party scripts are used except for Live-Chat. And even that one is only loaded when you click on the Live-Chat button.
Maybe pi-hole doesn’t like "cookie-banner" class/id of the cookie banner component?
EDIT: there are some default landen.co scripts (for landing page only), but they are fairly standard and shouldn’t be invasive for some extensions to block them…
177 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadI have always felt certain anxiety when thinking about my salary and only guessing what my colleagues might be earning. This issue is especially problematic in cultures and countries in which talking about wage numbers is an unspoken taboo among the employees.
Quite often, the questions like “Should I ask for a raise?, or am I already earning maximum that my employer can handle?” “Am I earning too much for the work that I do?, or am I underpaid?” “Who should I look up to and learn what they are doing to get a higher salary?” have plagued my mind.
# Existing solutions:
Of course, there are services where you can look at salary levels or statistical distributions of wages. The problem with them is that they don’t give you specific (albeit anonymized) numbers of what individuals earn, and they don’t satisfy nagging feelings of fear and anxiety that I have mentioned above. Also, it’s hard to tell whether the numbers are up-to-date or not.
# The solution:
I designed this product to be privacy-first so that many more users feel comfortable sharing their wage information and keeping it up-to-date. It allows users to see all salary entries in their current company, search for other companies in preparation for negotiations. Here is the full list of features:
- I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles
- I nudge users to update their info twice a year
- I keep information quality high
- You keep your data anonymous
- You can see your and other companies data
- You can subscribe for updates for particular job titles/companies
# Plans for the next version:
I plan to allow users to share their non-anonymized information in an encrypted peer-to-peer fashion with each other if they want to. This answers the question like, “Oh, somebody earns twice as much as me… And has the same job title… Who is that?”
Tell me what you think about it! Is there something missing from your perspective?
In fact, the requirements are quite relaxed already. I wanted to make it even more strict, but my partner insisted on relaxing them.
The age of simple passwords are long gone, as they are really easy to crack with enough budget.
Have you considered a password manager that can generate random unique and strong passwords for each website (and store them securely) for you?
Requiring a long password on a site where the impact of a breach is minimal is not a good policy, you're just going to get people who can't ever login.
- What kind of data are you storing about a user? You mention verification with LinkedIn but what happens if your database is compromised 6 months later and all data is accessed by a malicious 3rd party?
- When checking salaries, I prefer to search a job title and look at the average salary of a country, city, region or a company. Do you provide these features?
- I looked at the demo application and only thing I see is a table with some entries. Unfortunately, this is not very user friendly.
- The way to success is to have a lot of salary entries in your database. As a newly established service owner, how do you plan to keep users with your service and providing updates rather than using glassdoor etc. competitors?- How do you plan to monetize this service?
Please do not see my comments as offensive, I mean to ask honest questions and give criticism.
- For the data question, you can find all the information on our privacy policy in details (https://www.fellowage.io/privacy): what is stored, how it’s processed and for what reason, lawful basis, etc. Please read this about how I disassociate account information (and protect it) from raw pseudo-anonymized wage entries (that are already "public"—available to all users of the system via search): https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-privacy-an...
- I don’t provide these features right now. Currently, product solves slightly different problem, and I think it’s possible to expand its feature set to cover for search by job title/location, or company. You can already search by company/location though. (It’s a search bar at the top of the webapp’s UI).
- These are all features that show you statistical distributions, and while they are useful, there are plenty of tools that solve for that problem already. I set out to solve slightly different problem: “Who should I look up to in my company to earn more?” or “How up-to-date are specific salary entries?”
- I plan to notify my users to update their entries every half a year. Also, there are features that allow users to set up alerts for certain companies/locations/job-titles when there are new entries, or updates. These alerts are aggregated in a weekly report (if it’s not empty, of course).
- The current plan for monetization: there are two types of accounts: free and paid. Free account can view their own company/location without limitations, and for viewing of other companies/locations there are 3 monthly free views, that can be substantially and permanently boosted with referrals (similar to what Dropbox did with their referrals). Paid account has no limitations, of course.
Please tell me what you think about these replies! :)
Lost me right there. Good luck with that. LinkedIn is notoriously a garbage dump of spam, recruiters and fake profiles. That’s on top of the fact that most people (myself included) don’t have a LinkedIn profile to begin with in order to curb spam.
As another option, talk to a recruiter.
I can tell you that anxiety of not knowing is better than the anger/disappointment/a whole host of other destructive emotions after you do know. Companies don't want to deal with this. It can easily get ugly.
In my case, my boss'boss actually had the balls to tell me that he will not be terrorized by me suggesting there are greener pastures out there. Looking back it was a big mistake. Should have waited for an offer and then use this information.
Moral of the story. Be careful what you wish for.
Couldn't you find a bunch of people who are in that job title in your org? I'm sure with some detective work you could connect the dots on individuals you care to track down, depending on the size of the company.
All the best and thanks for making this.
Btw, demo redirects to a heroku app domain, is this intended?
This works the other way around too, someone who was not hired, some ex-employee with some gripe against their previous employer, a misbehaving competitor... Just about anyone can go about submitting false reviews about your company in order to damage your employer-brand.
Goodhart's Law at work.
I don't see how this works at all except at the bottom level.
If I read that your salary is X, and interview, I expect that the negotiation revolves roughly around X.
If you offer me 0.7*X I'm going to walk and I expect anyone qualified would.
Otherwise it‘s not so anonymous. Sometimes the combination of role and Salary is enough to point to a single employee. That’s precisely the reason why you only get statistical information at the other sites.
On the other hand, it’s not provable (I don’t save the exact number, and I separate the account and wage entry securely so that the user and only user can realize that connection: https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-privacy-an...).
If I apply replace entries with statistical ranges, then the product would become a clone of other products for this (like Glasdoor, LinkedIn Salary, etc.). And it won’t solve the problems I set out to solve with it anymore.
e.g., “Who should I look up to in my company to earn more?” or “How up-to-date are specific salary entries?”
My product doesn’t answer the first question just yet, but it will in the future via a peer-to-peer sharing feature that I’m planning in the next version.
never heard such bullshit before lmao
No, I don't want to use a password manager.
Now, I’m including most special characters, so it should work.
PS: Also, the pre-flight validation now includes special character check too, so you can see the validity real-time instead of after you submit. (This check was not originally included on the client-side, only on the server).
Also, it doesn't seem to accept EUR as a currency.
IE: Client side : `$('#currency').value = "EUR";`
About currency: It works, when you type the currency, you need to select the entry from the auto-complete. I’m thinking about making it select the currency automatically if only one option matches.
Maybe an app where you scan some QR code, that somebody randomly puts in your break room or so...
What do you think should this QR code lead to?
Salary information of one particular person (that put the QR code in the room)? Or salaries of group of people who work there?
IMO this is not production ready.
I’ve used best industry practices for such web apps, and I’m curious what do you think these concerns are!
It's only a taboo to the extent that other people are vaguely worried that it might be. :-)
It only helps employees to keep salaries opaque.
On the other hand, nothing good ever comes out of sharing salaries with current coworkers. If you make more they are going to be upset.
You don't ever want your pay tied to seniority. You want it based on the value you can deliver. That way, you with your 10 years of experience and proven ability to ship good products get to make twice as much as Senior Dev John with 10 years experience maintaining the internal CRUD app.
Possible answer: Because you never ran a company and might lack empathy?
This subject is more complex and just questioning something from a personal, individual perspective won't give you an answer.
2) Every day I read about another database with x million user accounts ending up on the open web. What could possibly go wrong here?
Hence the concern over the security of it overall.
Speak for yourself, please.
On the other hand, your comment suggests that you are someone who tries to win a discussion by clumsily insulting his opponent.
Thats a bit of a stretch.. Common decency about CP is pretty much universal. But if that triggers you. Too bad.
I think that we do partly agree on a thing. The way so many are-- as I like to put it-- running massive marketing campaigns to define and redefine "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is pretty horrible. We probably don't agree on which definitions should stick or fall away, but that's off topic, too.
"Is that an accident" was not entirely meant to be the accusing rhetorical question that it seems like now. It's also, what's your angle? And you answered that.
P.S. (hating people with stupid views) < (hating their stupid views)
Where was that?
As to your personal freedom to make light of an industry that commercialises the destruction of young lives, I have no interest in that discussion so I refrain from commenting.
Where are such jokes? How even is that topic here?
I’m confused.
1. How is this different to Glassdoor?
2. How do you get enough data points to be useful?
3. How do you account for selection bias?
4., (and here's the big one) how do you account for the mistruths of self-reported income?
The last one is the big problem with all self-reported income summaries. One thing I've learned over the year is that people lie, even anonymously. I'm not even sure why. Do they really believe it? Are they posting it to make themselves feel good? I really don't know. But I do know that I don't believe your salary claim until I see a W2.
As for selection bias, this is a big one too. Take a company like Google. At level 7+ data point get pretty thin. This is partially because there aren't that many but the real problem is that these people really have no motivation to share. So you don't really see the big outliers.
Lastly, most of these aren't clear on what number they are report and what users should report. Is it base salary? What about bonus? What about RSUs/options?
As anyone who has worked in big tech knows, base salary number are almost completely useless. Salary band is defined by level (pretty tightly, in my experience). More than 50% of your total compensation will come from bonus and stock and stock in particular has massive variance.
Yelp themselves have addressed this with a dedicated page: https://www.yelp.com/extortion
Maybe I’ve been duped. I’d be curious if your comment is based on different research, or personal experience.
They do not "manipulate" ratings, sure... They just take a looong time to "Review" positive reviews, and not too long to "Review" negative reviews you get. And, of course, only reviews they have "reviewed can be shown and count towards your average score...
I'm confused about how you think this would work.
1. Yelp doesn't report on its approval speed.
2. To get an accurate report on this, you would have to have several accounts posting positive and negative reviews on the same pages. Yelp doesn't allow this and would ban the accounts.
3. Yelp explicitly disallows scraping their site (i.e. having a bot archive the pages). Doing so would be thwarted by their anti-bot measures. It's also against their TOS.[0]
Do you have web archives that can be used to build these stats?
[0]: https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Can-I-copy-or-scrape-da...
1. You don’t need that to demonstrate statistically significant difference between paying and non-paying customers
2. You don’t need to make any accounts, only read existing and incoming data
3. Yes, you shouldn’t break TOS but you also shouldn’t be throwing around unsubstantiated accusations of extortion
I have no need to convince you or anyone else. But I am convinced. I trust my eyes a lot more than I trust yelp.
Right now you don’t even have proper N=1.
Or is it just additional features of the platform without altering the review data?
Also, I hate ads too.
For this business domain, that leaves a business model where "power users" of the product can get more features, or more access, or more detailed data for a premium fee.
Are there even more alternatives? What do you think?
So this is what I'm talking about when I say that non-salary compensation can easily eclipse your salary at a big tech company.
(This will be flagged for offending sensibilities, not because it's untrue. (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/13/study-black-employees-get-lo...) Negotiating from the position of someone who the hiring manager doesn't believe has room to negotiate negatively impacts your final offer.)
But it's an irrelevant and juvenile point anyway, because it's not something you can change. Negotiation tactics, BATNA, etc are all things you can influence. Your race or how the hiring manager perceives it are not.
(Regardless of whether gender transitions count as a choosing to become a man, I don't think it would do much to boost income in our current society.)
The link seems to suggest that white men get paid more than black men… what about asian men? They seem to be doing pretty well.
Why does this need to be an acronym? Seems like a convoluted way to say one should know their second best option when negotiating, but that seems like an obvious thing even a 5 year old knows.
2. By requiring users to share their wage information at signup. The idea is that to see salaries of others you need to share yours first. It’s possible to delete wage entry later, but also that makes the user lose access to others, until they either: add wage entry again or upgrade to paid account plan.
3. Yes, I agree that certain folks will have no motivation to share, because they don’t care to know what others ("below" their level) earn. What could be interesting for them is what others of the same or similar level earn. So maybe something like peer-to-peer sharing may be interesting to these folk.
4. We’re going to implement an algorithm that will try to detect "suspicious" data entries, and devise some a more advanced validation mechanism. Such entries will be hidden from other users in the meantime.
So there are two fields: core wage (this is what you get no matter what), and other benefits estimate (here you just bundle everything else, and for non-deterministic stuff, make your best estimate, of what it’s worth).
"More than 50% come from bonus or stock, or others" is actually not quite true in every culture or country. For what I’ve seen here in Germany and in few other countries, 90% or even more is the base salary.
This seems like a bad idea. Aren't you concerned this will lower the quality and accuracy of submissions? I know when some website forces me to put in details I don't think it needs I put in garbage.
Also you're asking people to submit data when they have no idea what data you already have. Are they first to submit?
This reminds me of Auto generated pages with no content or no answer yet that's not clear from a Google SERP. You get the "helpful" message like "be the first to post X". I actually wish Google would downrank questions with no answers and empty wiki pages.
It smacks of clickbait is what I'm getting at. If you measure it you'll probably find your bounce rate is really high.
I validate the information (current job title, company name and location) via user’s LinkedIn profile manually.
I don’t validate the "numbers", but I plan to implement an algorithm that’ll mark "suspicious" entries, and will hide them or delete them from the system. Additionally, owners of such records will be prompted to update them when they log in into the system next time.
How do you know?
Glassdoor under-reports salaries because unhappy people are overrepresented there. Unhappy people are likely to be underpaid compared to their happy peers. Anything that helps us gather data relevant to negotiations and eliminate the salary-sharing stigma is a good step forward.
> people lie, even anonymously
People lie about taboos. If salary sharing becomes commonplace, they might feel compelled to tell the truth.
I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago and never looked back. They're shady as all hell.
I'm curious about this given you can update/delete your salary entry - does there not have to be a unique identifier between the account and the entry?
SPOILER: asymmetric encryption with private/public keys.
The only way to make this kind of thing work, is to legislate salary transparency.
That may seem to disincentivize individual excellence (by removing the rewards), but I'd say that it's OK to pay Bob more than Joe, as long as you are willing to justify that increase in wages. As a manager, I had to fight like hell to get promotions and increases for my team, so I always had this information handy.
The other way to incentivize excellence and effort is through bonuses, but these could easily become opaque, thus, continuing the issue.
In academia, salaries tend to be [relatively] low, so perks become the currency.
Human nature dictates that we always want to be "better than" our peers (thus making them "not-peers"). We always seem to find ways to do end-runs around the system.
I'm fairly glad to be out of the corporate rat-race. I'm doing my own thing, making less than I ever have, and loving every minute of it.
And I do believe that every company needs to get very transparent on how they decide the salary, when they pay someone differently. There should be a well-designed set of rules and processes to follow. This way, people who want to earn more, know exactly what to do and in which direction should they grow and develop. Also, if they think that this direction doesn’t align with their personal goals, they can make a better decision about joining another company, where interests will align better.
I've heard they do this in one or more Scandinavian countries. Essentially, you can go online and see what your coworkers and neighbors earn.
I have a feeling that's why salaries in these countries, especially when you include state defined insurance and pension plans, are so normalized. It's probably also why more innovation tends to take place in the US (subjectively).
For many of us in the US, I think this would actually be a net negative, myself included. There is so much division in this country, eventually employers will simply be forced to dish out nearly identical salaries for everyone in order to avoid lawsuits and government penalties, even when talent and performance is radically different between employees.
For example, Employee X has a BS in CS from a great engineering school which took a lot of effort to obtain. He was hacking away at code on his own as a teenager and is passionate about tech, and is often working on open source projects on weekends and evenings.
Another employee comes in - she got a watered-down "Information Systems" degree from some mediocre pay-to-play online school, and her previous knowledge of technology is her IPhone and Facebook. She pays her tutition fees, does the minimum to graduate, and now has her BS, too.
She discovers the talented guy make 50% more than her, even though he's the guy leading the development projects, ensuring standards are met, cleaning up the garbage produced by other junior coders, etc. We all know that many teams form this dynamic, especially in typical contracting and enterprise shops.
Well of course she'll complain. They both have similar 'credentials' on paper, both work 40 hours, both are in their 30s. Management won't care that one dev is worth 5x the other, they want to avoid lawsuits and government penalties. So his salary is lowered, hers is raised. Because he knows he won't get paid what he's worth anywhere else since it's the same everywhere, he just stop performing at work, the whole project suffers.
And yes, this has happened in my work place several times in the last few years as salaries have become more transparent and there are more complaints from groups who feel that they're being discriminated against, regardless of their performance and experience.
The problem with bonuses, is that they are very easy to abuse, and many corporations have incredibly rigid bonus systems that actually make it difficult to reward individual excellence.
I was just talking with a friend of mine a couple of days ago. He's a Director at a manufacturing plant, and is awesome.
He spent the last year, working 7 days a week, ten hours a day, to implement some new processes. The company is being put out to bid for sale, and his efforts doubled the price.
His efforts alone.
Doubled the price of the company.
He got a tiny raise, and all Directors get the same bonus, based on sales numbers (which weren't so good). Also, all Directors get the same percentage of equity.
I suspect that he may be seeing who else could use his talents...
I’d rather spend 10h a day 7 days a week pouring efforts into my own assets, or towards my vision, and not for someone else’s assets or vision, especially if I have no say and stake in the high level decisions (like sale of the company).
I would have assumed that the person learning on their own, working on open source projects, and hacking away on stuff since they were a kid went to the mediocre school. They just need the paper to open the gates.
The person who went to the "top-tier" school is more likely to be working the system and generally turning in garbage at work. Their parents have a buddy on the board, or the department is run by a frat/sorority acquaintance, or they just get extra consideration because "top-tier" school resume.
An yes, I've seen this at many places over the years... Guess who the first whiner is?
I have coded my own cookie banner and didn’t use any of the existing tools out there. That’s why I’m surprised if something is blocking it, but there was already another comment about the same as well.
This is to be honest, weird thing for adblocker to do—to block legitimate cookie banner.
And yes, website is not going to work until the required cookie is accepted (my backend rejects requests when they don’t specify that the necessary cookie consent was given).
Do you use some third party script or something?
Maybe pi-hole doesn’t like "cookie-banner" class/id of the cookie banner component?
EDIT: there are some default landen.co scripts (for landing page only), but they are fairly standard and shouldn’t be invasive for some extensions to block them…
Why would I want my HR Dept to be pissed off? I like them and think they and my employer are doing a good job.
And what could I possibly gain? I don't care how much others make, I am happy with my income and I won't violate my employment contract.