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LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn
- wdewind 10y agoSelf 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?
- hamandcheese 10y agoWhat incentive do people have to lie about their salary (assuming it's anonymous)?
- wdewind 10y agoWell in this specific case LinkedIn makes it so you have to report your salary to see other salary data, so that right there is one place where people have an incentive to add junk just to get the data. But the more important problem is the selection bias.
- tyingq 10y agoOutside of lying, I've not seen an implementation of this that fully accounts for compensation outside of base salary (bonus, options, 401k matching, benefits, etc). I suspect some are entering only base, some base+bonus, or similar.
- oarsinsync 10y agoLinkedIn Salary appears to be reporting base salaries and total compensation.
- kbart 10y agoNot 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.
- vostok 10y agoEmpirically, we see the opposite happening and compensation data on websites like Glassdoor is actually too low.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agoto be fair, glassdoor still averages in salaries from 5 years ago into the current salary
- vostok 10y agoThat's part of it. People with higher salaries don't contribute for privacy reasons. They're also missing bonus/equity data for many firms.
- ryandrake 10y agoHow do you know that the data on Glassdoor is too low? What is your source of truth? Anecdote? Glassdoor currently reports the average base salary for the job title "Senior Software Engineer" in SF Bay Area to be ~$130K which sounds about right to me, again, with nothing but anecdotal truth reference. If you go by what people say on HN, then of course everyone in software makes $300K a year and has millions in stock options (and gets 5 job offers in their inbox a week).
- vostok 10y agoI know how much I am paid, how much some of my coworkers are paid, how much my company pays new grads, and what the average salary on Glassdoor is for my company. The average is lower than what new grads got in 2016. On top of the incorrect base salary, the information on bonuses/equity is extremely limited. The average that is listed is also incorrect.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- patcheudor 10y agoThere 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 their field.
- chrisdbaldwin 10y agoAnd who is to stop a software company from doing the opposite? If they want lower wages, they could spam a region with fake workers with lower wages.
- patcheudor 10y agoThus to the original point: self reported data is questionable.
- mfoy_ 10y agoIt would be neat if the IRS / CRA / national tax body would publish summaries based on people's actual tax returns. Although you don't specify things like industry, and other career specific quirks on your tax returns. (i.e. Ruby on Rails developer vs Dynamics CRM developer)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- twokul 10y agoone 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-salary-transparency-to-the-world https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar.... TL;DR; we do outlier detection.
- ones_and_zeros 10y ago
- clifanatic 10y agoWell, if everybody else thinks that programmers make $200K/year, there's a chance that somebody might consider paying $200K/year. That seems like an incentive to me.
- user5994461 10y agoNope. Lots of places can't pay that money. They'll still try to interview and hire people but they can't compete. There is a very wide range of salary, skill and experience in tech. A single figure is not of much use. If anything it might be ruined by the vast majority of cheap companies (i.e. outside of Google/Apple/Facebook/... )
- ghurtado 10y agoMaybe, but you would need massive collusion with millions of developers that you have never met in order to pull this stunt. I don't think that sounds very plausible.
- clifanatic 10y agoWell, we have you and we have me - who else is on board?
- ghurtado 10y agoHate to say it, but you only have you so far.
- plandis 10y agoAssuming you wanted to work for LinkedIn and Microsoft I'd definitely encourage you to lie about your current salary just in case they were so inclined to look it up and leverage it against you.
- kozhevnikov 10y agoIT Jobs Watch surveys recruiters for permanent roles data and contractors quotes for rates. http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/
- 72deluxe 10y agoI have used this site. It seems fairly accurate - does everyone else find this too?
- mordaroso 10y agoThe Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland sends compulsory salary surveys to the enterprises itself. The collected data is then published in the Salarium [1]. It is based on more than 750'000 salaries from the private sector and runs since 1994. You can read more about the methodology in the PDF [2] I worked as a Software Developer for a company that used the data as base for their salary negotiations and it worked quite well. [1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/wages-income-employment-labour-costs/wage-levels-switzerland/salarium%20.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/... [2] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfsstatic/dam/assets/6937/master https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfsstatic/dam/assets/6937/master
- kozhevnikov 10y agoInteresting video about somewhat public tax returns, and hence salary, in Norway and other Nordic countries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bO8zEaSuWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bO8zEaSuWg
- varjag 10y agoThere was no "hence salary" part. The salary back-estimation was very rough, e.g. for my income the estimation by a popular calculator was off by 25%. Using past tense here because anonymous access to tax data is discontinued. You could tell if someone was poor or rich based on that, but for comparing incomes in your cohort it was not very useful.
- mdorazio 10y agoFor tech work, you can use H1B salary data (from somewhere like http://h1bdata.info/ 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.
- vostok 10y agoThe problem is that this only includes base salary.
- mdorazio 10y agoYes, you're right. But base salary is the only reliable number to use for comparisons. If we get into things like startup stock options, value is effectively zero on a probability scale. Monetary bonuses are paid out based on all kinds of factors that may or may not come to pass, and have their own taxes associated with them. The only reliable extra comp I can think of would be RSUs and similar at large tech companies, but those are already fairly well known.
- vostok 10y agoIn my industry bonuses are as reliable as public company RSUs. To my knowledge, there is less public information on RSU grants and bonuses so I am puzzled by your last sentence.
- mdorazio 10y agoWhere have you looked? For example, a quick search on Quora will tell you the range of RSUs handed out to employees at Google at various levels.
- mabermoske 10y agoI 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/ https://www.theworknumber.com/
- markwaldron 10y agoAre they going to access our email without our permission to get this information too?
- notyourwork 10y agoI wonder if Google has not already parsed this information out of job offers sent to Gmail users.
- deadmik3 10y agoIt seems like the areas are really limited. Best I could find for my central Mass location was "Greater Boston Area" which really skews the numbers up (obviously cost of living in Boston is higher)
- twokul 10y agowe are going to be rolling out search by city soon
- chairmanwow 10y agoYeah. Very few regions available internationally. Couldn't find a single city in China, France, Turkey, Israel etc.
- drusepth 10y agoYep, I may not be the target demographic (working remotely as software developer, hiring remote software developers for personal projects) but it kind of sucks for remote-first companies (i.e. fully-remote) also, as it requires a location to make comparisons to. The map at the bottom of the landing page would be cool to have as a proper tool (seeing salary-per-title comparisons across the map), but I can't seem to find it anywhere for actual use.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- BlackjackCF 10y agoThey can't even find info on SREs for the Greater LA area yet.
- notyourwork 10y agoI'm not sure why that is surprising. Its a new product/service, I suspect over time the data will expand/mature.
- electriclove 10y agoI played around a bit and didn't find it too useful. The folks at step.com (previously posted on HN) produce something that is much more useful for me: https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-linkedin/ https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-linke...
- xeromal 10y agoWhat didn't you like about it? Can you give a small comparison?
- AIMunchkin 10y agoAs someone who has worked at several of the listed companies in that plot, that's significantly more accurate (IMO of course) than either Glassdoor or the Salary data.
- arcanus 10y agoInteresting that the SDE2 at twitter is shown as lower than SDE1
- koolba 10y agoSo when will LinkedIn release a plugin that hacks into your HR system to fetch (and upload to them) the salaries of you and all your peers?
- SEJeff 10y agoI love that you're assuming they haven't already released it :)
- koolba 10y ago> I love that you're assuming they haven't already released it :) Ha! I didn't even think about that! Plus with Microsoft owning them, it's directly integrated as a core feature of Exchange Server. Probably rolled out in the most recent "security update" patch.
- k2xl 10y agoI built a (free) chrome extension that will estimate salaries of LinkedIn profiles you view (along with other data) https://recap.work https://recap.work It's not perfect, but it is helpful when trying to get an idea of what someone is making. The upgraded version has salary conversion support for different currencies for other countries.
- pinaceae 10y agowell, comparab.ly better step up fast.
- vonklaus 10y agoThis is data a lot of people have wanted for a lot of good reasons. While this could flatten the labor market and even out a corps advantage from asymmetrical info dist-- I would've rather anyone but linkedin be successful here. Other than extremely tiny sample sets, no one has actually succeeded in this space/featureset. I can barely see peoples profiles without getting signups shoved down my throat. Fuck linkedin. It is a closed service which disproportionately provides value in a way that makes it nearly useless, while simultaneosly selling data to recruiters and companies. So this wont help anyone as much as linkedin and I am skeptical this data will be open.
- KiwiCoder 10y agoI believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend. Of course I'm speaking only from personal experience, but as both candidate and hiring manager LinkedIn holds next to no value for me. I see it as a commons that has been largely ruined by recruiting agents who are incentivised by their employers to maximise candidate throughput at everyone else's expense. There is some residual value in LinkedIn groups, where peers can network for mutual benefit, but these pools of genuine interaction inevitably attract recruiting agents - if indeed they aren't already present as groups admins, happily lurking while candidates posture and parade. But I'm not about to close my account (if that is even possible). I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.
- mundo 10y ago"Contact info storage service for ex-colleagues I wasn't chummy enough to add on a real social network" pretty much sums it up for me.
- mathattack 10y agoI think there's a big gap between current and former colleagues I want to keep professional contact with, and folks I want to show photos of my kids.
- komali2 10y agoInteresting, I am a recruiter turned software engineer and have the exact opposite feeling. When I was a recruiter it was a fantastic way to find niche candidates and just maintain a casual discussion with my best candidates in general, as well as publish relevant news to my connections. As I was undergoing the transformation to engineer, it was a fantastic platform for me to reach out to people in my new industry and city, people who had gone down my path before, mentors, and etc. Then when it was time for job search, LinkedIn and Angel.co had the highest quality postings. Also, on LinkedIn when looking at a job posting I could see if someone from my bootcamp or university worked there, as a link right under the job posting.
- deleted 10y ago
- allengeorge 10y agoHopefully 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...
- twokul 10y agoI'd suggest you to read https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salary-transparency-to-the-world https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar..., the section about privacy.
- mavelikara 10y agoHere is what the _current_ content says: One of the interesting dichotomies with compensation data is that many users want this information, but don’t want to have their individual data exposed or connected back to them. Salary information is personal to each of our members. With this in mind, and consistent with our Members First organizational philosophy, one of the first goals we established when we set out to embark on this project was to provide powerful salary insights in aggregate without risking an individual’s private information. In the end, we built a salary collection system to provide the strongest protections for the anonymity of all of our members—no easy task. Parts of our approach are detailed later in this article. Because we proactively separate a member’s submission data from their Member ID when compensation data is submitted, it enables us to secure the system in such a way that we cannot even support the ability for a member to update their previously submitted salary information - they have to resubmit. Furthermore, our system provides protection not just from hackers out in the wild, but also provides access control against unauthorized use by internal users. If I am reading this correctly, what they seem to say is that as implemented currently, they don't have the ability to track a person's salary information to their profile and hence won't be able to sell that information.
- Balgair 10y agoTrue, but that is not the issue. The clickwrap means nothing to me when they have this rider: "7. Right to Terminate or Modify Software LinkedIn may modify the Software and this EULA with notice to you either in email or by publishing notice on the Website, including but not limited to charging fees for the Software, or changing the functionality or appearance of the Software. In the event LinkedIn modifies the Software or the EULA, you may terminate this EULA and cease use of the Software. LinkedIn may terminate your use of the Software, the EULA or the LinkedIn Service at any time, *with or without notice.*" (emphasis mine)[0] Fundamentally, I cannot ever trust them. [0]https://www.linkedin.com/legal/mobile/eula https://www.linkedin.com/legal/mobile/eula
- mswen 10y agoAwhile 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.
- ones_and_zeros 10y agoI'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.
- notyourwork 10y agoIts an interesting approach but I see trouble convincing a user to give their mint credentials to a site for salary information. Imagine if Glassdoor or LinkedIn asked for this.
- ones_and_zeros 10y agoYou wouldn't need to give your mint credentials. They have an API so that you can create an app that gets read only access based on an OAuth token for a particular user. Similar to fb oauth, google, etc.
- tonywe64 10y agoTry out this Chrome extension that works as a LinkedIn recruiting assistant, it provides salary range estimates based on company, job title, and region. As well as the likelihood of changing job along with many other data points. https://candidate.ai https://candidate.ai
- FLUX-YOU 10y agoThis is never going to be accurate. Titles alone are a poor indicator of ability in software. E.g. I hold the title of "Senior Software Engineer" despite only have 2 years/4 mo. of experience and very little of that experience is project management or non-code things. When talking to recruiters in my area for a new position and giving a base salary of $90k, they routinely come back with "You won't get that offer with your level of experience". In practice, I routinely cut the Senior from my title to avoid expectations I can't meet. Dice.com has a much better idea behind this, which is tying skills and years of skill to estimated salary. The backend for LinkedIn's site honestly does not look more complex than a few straight-forward SQL queries.
- twokul 10y agoyou are making a lot of assumptions, read up on accuracy here https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salary-transparency-to-the-world https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar...
- FLUX-YOU 10y agoThere's no details in there about valuation of skills and how that plays into the results. For other industries where titles are a little more controlled, it may be a fine measuring stick, but people hire in software based on what skills you have and what you've done. Not by title.
- krisdol 10y agoAgreed. I've seen Senior be anywhere from Level 2 to Level 5 Software Engineer, depending on how the company assigns the wording.
- TheCoelacanth 10y agoIt lets you filter by ranges of years of experience. I was way below the median when putting in just my title, but within a few thousand when also choosing the right years of experience range.
- codingdave 10y ago
- pmiller2 10y agoThis seems like a game everybody is wanting to get in on these days. That alone is making me wonder: why? and why now?
- notyourwork 10y agoI think it has something to do with supply and demand of engineers both continuing to grow. The market is increasing and any growing market gives people a reason to justify trying to get in on the action.
- usaphp 10y agoI still don't understand what people are using LinkedIn for.
- kraftman 10y agoJobs? I get a lot of jobs offers via linkedin.
- adamredwoods 10y agoNetworking. It's a rolodex.
- oldmanjay 10y agoI use it to chuckle over emails suggesting I endorse people I don't know for skills I'm not certain they have. I also enjoy when people who don't know me endorse me for skills they can't possibly know I have, and may not even possess. It's a cute game.
- ryandrake 10y agoI've never actually found a job through LinkedIn, but I appreciate that it COULD be a good way to do so. It's got the potential. I think it just needs a few product changes and a whole lot more credibility with respect to customer privacy, and it could be a really great platform. Unlike most of HN, I actually appreciate recruiters reaching out and I try to get back to each of them, if only to just understand what's out there, what possibilities I may be overlooking.
- notyourwork 10y agoI use it as a way to get free interview practice. Any recruiter contact I am interested in I will reach out to and entertain the interview process for. Whether I am looking for not I have no problem getting free practice and if I find a team/company I like I might just change jobs.
- kurtpre 10y agoNot really convincing (yet). Mainly US & UK cities, and the data is based on small user numbers so far. Would say you get so far a better overview on https://teleport.org https://teleport.org or www.glassdoor.com...
- Fifer82 10y agoCompletely unproven, but all I see this doing, is driving down wages. No one will say "I think we are not paying enough, looking at this average". It will be "We are paying far too much, lets bring ourselves inline".
- vivekpreddy 10y agoI'm not the biggest fan of Linkedin, but this strikes me as quite cynical. I've been recruiting internally for a number of good startups and I've used salary transparency to advocate for better offers for prospective candidates. There will be a few bad actors as there already exist, but I do think this is a step in the right direction towards at least giving prospective employees a better understanding of their own worth.
- adamredwoods 10y agoCould be beneficial on both sides. Image a woman getting an offer, she can see the average pay and compare hers to that, so she can request equal pay. I find most companies are generally in the know on how well they're paying their employees (employee retention, counter-offers, etc), it's the employees that lack this information.
- grahn 10y agoI would assume that there is otherwise generally information asymmetry in the labour market, in the sense that employers usually have more knowledge of salaries than employees. Making good information openly available to both parties should benefit the party with less information more: the employee.
- st3v3r 10y agoAt the same time, if they are paying less than the average, won't that prompt them to at least move up to that?
- adamredwoods 10y agoProbably not, no incentive. Some hiring managers will put the pressure on the prospect to ask for more. If you can hire a quality employee for a little less than average, your bottom line comes out better.
- mikebay 10y agoDear Microsoft, we have a small trust issue between you and my personal information..
- mywittyname 10y agoHow come?
- scottlegrand2 10y agoNumbers are way off for the bay area for those with hot skills much like Zillow's house prices are off for desirable houses in OK neighorhoods. Hard to see how they'd distinguish between that and malicious outliers. Or to oversimplify it: never stop learning and you'll never stop earning.
- romanovcode 10y agoAnd as always, doesn't work in Europe.
- cookiecaper 10y agoSurprised no one has yet mentioned that this is probably an attempt to neuter Glassdoor. LinkedIn makes money by monopolizing recruiter time, taking money for job posts, etc. Glassdoor is a threat to that, and the single unique benefit Glassdoor offers is a salary estimate. I don't really see this as a fundamental shift in anything, just an attempt to tack on a competitor's featureset.
- bbcbasic 10y agoYey! I can now go to Linkedin for the mean average of some pseudo-random numbers, cough sorry I meant salary information.
- xapata 10y ago> "Data Scientist" -- Title not found. Please select a valid title. I thought Patil invented that term for LinkedIn (along with Hammerbacher at Facebook).
- yalogin 10y agoIts amusing to me that linkedin recruiters are the ones consistently sending me requests for completely unrelated jobs. The rest of the crowd seem to be at least related but linkedin recruiters just don't seem to care. Not sure why.
- johnward 10y agoIf someone goes through the work to find my email address then it's generally a related job. LinkedIn makes it too easy to spam.
- loeg 10y ago> Lest you think you can get away with putting in a random number if you want to visit the Salary pages but don’t want to give up your information (or pay up for Premium membership), think again. Shapero said that there are machine learning tools in place to detect when you’ve put in an “off” figure. This seems pretty flawed. You can still put in a random number in some band, skewing the data (probably) upwards.
- sherifmansour 10y agoWhile this is sort of cool for some people, I think the sad thing about a tool like this is that it's only going to encourage the wrong behaviors for a lot of people. It puts more focus on people's job titles than what they actually do. It encourages people to chase the corporate ladder, not find meaningful jobs... I'm sure it adds a lot of value to some, but some small part of me can't help but think there are thousands of people searching for their job titles today and running up to their manager asking for the next title...
- AsyncAwait 10y ago> It encourages people to chase the corporate ladder, not find meaningful jobs. From my (arguably limited) experience, if you want a truly meaningful job, nothing beats your own business as in a corporation you'll always be subject to office politics, wishes and desires of your superiors, corporate deciding to change course etc., that's at least what I am planning to do in order for my work to be truly "meaningful". The trouble is, you'll usually have to take a pay cut for the first couple of years and it's a greater risk than most people are willing to take.
- dozzie 10y agoIt's not a binary choice, corporation or own business. There are others' small businesses, too.
- scottmcdot 10y agoCan only view Melbourne, Florida Area. No Melbourne, Australia yet.
- brongondwana 10y agoEveryone knows that nothing outside the USA really exists