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Idea: anonymous salary data

7 points by jgrahamc ↗ HN
Set up a simple web site where people can enter their job title, location and salary. Totally anonymous plus all data from the survey is made public. To get salary data you'd have to give your own salary information.

Why is salary data so hard to find?

14 comments

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brk
How would this be different than salary.com?
catalinist
Maybe to make it simpler and global - not just US.
nextmoveone
Salary.com does not return results for a lot of queries for one.
brk
What problem are you trying to solve? What is the need for "a lot of queries"?

Just curious. This seems like a good(ish) idea, but also one that is not as easy as it sounds. There are no ISO standards for titles, so something like "VP of Business Development" can mean wildly different things from person to person, or company to company.

You would have to (IMO) do a lot to standardize the input options and verify the data to make it really useful.

steveplace
Well instead of job titles, have it based on other parameters. Example: Degree, College graduated from, years in field, field, area

Then you can do all sorts of fancy stuff (income vs. location; true after-tax income; ratio of income vs. COLA)

Then you could monetize it quickly by linking to off-site job postings, creating your own job board, offering banking opportunities.

yep, gonna file that one away in my idea book.

nextmoveone
Well for instance...I tried 'Web Developer' in West Palm Beach, Fl and in Miami, Fl.No cigar.

I tried 'PHP Developer' in both cities, nothing.

I tried 'Ruby Developer' in both cities, nothing.

I tried 'Java Developer' in both cities, I got something for Miami.

When I say a lot of queries I meant the majority as in this case.

dpapathanasiou
I'd question the accuracy of data gathered that way: people inflate how much they make.

Allowing people to submit that information anonymously only compounds the problem.

Kaizyn
I'd also be concerned about how 'anonymous' the data is. As you all know, they can tie any submissions back to an IP address or back to meddlesome cookies.
udai
check out payscale.com
henning
Could people spam it with inflated salaries in hopes of being able to point to it as an argument for getting a raise? :) ("All the other software engineers in this city are making $15k more than I am, mang!!")
ww
The spam has historically been a problem with this but how about an OCR capable component where the contributor is able to upload a picture of their check (not available to the public) thereby becominge 'confirmed'. That might keep out the riff raff enough to get good results.