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Show HN: I built a website for sharing salary info
- waterlink 7y ago# The problem: 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?
- polytronic 7y agoI 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
- waterlink 7y agoPlease use a stronger password. 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?
- aaronm67 7y agoPasswords 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aripickar 7y agoCheck out what levels.fyi is doing. They do specific numbers broken down by comp type for all different kinds of job levels.
- s5ma6n 7y agoWhile 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.
- waterlink 7y agoThese 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 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-and-anonymity-of-my-website-users-5fgb 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! :)
- maxaf 7y ago> I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles 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.
- waterlink 7y agoWhat do you think would be an alternative tool to verify that people enter real job titles, company names and location?
- AlexTWithBeard 7y agoI have always felt certain anxiety when thinking about my salary and only guessing what my colleagues might be earning. As another option, talk to a recruiter.
- LandR 7y agoOr talk to your colleagues. We talk about salary, bonus, raises etc.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago>>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. Moral of the story. Be careful what you wish for.
- friendlybus 7y ago>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.
- inertiatic 7y agoI surely hope this (or anything similar) catches on, but it's seriously hard to get something like this going. All the best and thanks for making this. Btw, demo redirects to a heroku app domain, is this intended?
- waterlink 7y agoYes, the demo doesn’t have a separate domain setup. Is there a particular issue you see with this? Please tell me if so!
- Eikon 7y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- someexgamedev 7y agoI'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. Goodhart's Law at work.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- phyzome 7y agoEasy enough: Write the glowing review, then contact Glassdoor and report your company. I'm fairly sure Glassdoor would then remove all the reviews.
- jacquesm 7y agoNo, they'd offer the company to remove the negative review for a fee.
- izzydata 7y agoWrite a good review, receive your severance and then change it to a negative review.
- waterlink 7y agoIn some countries the law specifically mentions that such terms of severance agreement is not valid and cannot be enforced.
- 7y ago
- mgliwka 7y agoCan 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.
- waterlink 7y agoYes, this is a pseudo-anonymization. Someone with enough information can always say: “Oh, I believe this is your salary entry.” 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-and-anonymity-of-my-website-users-5fgb 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.
- mberning 7y agoI like the idea. From the demo I could not tell but what measures exist to prevent actors from falsifying information?
- outime 7y agoHow is this different from the database of salaries that other services such as Glassdoor already offer?
- waterlink 7y agoAs 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.
- HugoDias 7y agoIsn't this the same thing Glassdoor does?
- corentin88 7y agoMaybe. 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.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoIt 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).
- AmazingTurtle 7y ago"This allows me to keep the quality of the data in FelloWage high." never heard such bullshit before lmao
- waterlink 7y agoPossibly I’m wrong somewhere here, but that is a “bullshit” I honestly believe in.
- dannyw 7y agoI 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. No, I don't want to use a password manager.
- withinboredom 7y agoI can't even sign up with a password manager. Says the password is great (even has special chars) but then get an error saying it doesn't.
- waterlink 7y agoThere 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).
- waterlink 7y agoWhy?
- flr03 7y agoLooks very much like glassdoor to me. Good work though.
- therealchiko 7y agoI 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.
- withinboredom 7y agoThis is terrible for distributed companies where putting in my location is a great way to find me. Also, it doesn't seem to accept EUR as a currency.
- bilekas 7y agoSure it will, the site is so flaky you can just pass through whatever you like from the FE. IE: Client side : `$('#currency').value = "EUR";`
- waterlink 7y agoAbout 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.
- nkrisc 7y agoIt does, you have to click the 'X' on the right side of the currency field before you can change. Don't ask me why.
- Double_a_92 7y agoI 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...
- waterlink 7y agoThis idea is quite interesting. 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?
- Double_a_92 7y agoI thought it would "invite" you to a group of shared salaries, where you can add your own, and see statistics about the others.
- bilekas 7y agoThere are some real concerns over the security on this site.. Even in the sandboxes heroku one. IMO this is not production ready.
- waterlink 7y agoCould you please write these concerns to my email alex [at] fellowage [dot] io? I’ve used best industry practices for such web apps, and I’m curious what do you think these concerns are!
- enriquto 7y agoI 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.
- phyzome 7y agoI'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. :-)
- scarface74 7y agoI’ll talk about salary pretty openly to former coworkers and friends who are either in my same salary range or who I know make more. 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.
- jasonkester 7y agoTurns 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.
- cookie_monsta 7y ago1) Jokes about child pornography are Not. Funny. Ever. Remove that if you wish to be taken seriously. 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?
- bilekas 7y agoI dont belive the OP put that into the job title, but I saw that too, there are a lot of injection issues here. Hence the concern over the security of it overall.
- Udik 7y ago> Jokes about child pornography are Not. Funny. Ever. Speak for yourself, please.
- dbtx 7y agoThis in turn suggests unpleasant things about yourself. Is that an accident?
- LandR 7y agoJokes about anything can be funny. Depends on the joke.
- dbtx 7y agoDepends on the person (and their sense of humor<->horror).
- Udik 7y agoIt 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.
- cletus 7y agoFour obvious questions: 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.
- lavezzi 7y agoDoes 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.
- t0mas88 7y agoWe 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.
- cletus 7y agoAh the Yelp business model.
- nemosaltat 7y ago
- eloisius 7y agohttp://levels.fyi http://levels.fyi
- phyzome 7y ago> Sign up with LinkedIn I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago and never looked back. They're shady as all hell.
- sgehly 7y ago>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?
- waterlink 7y agoRead more on how I’ve done it here: https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-privacy-and-anonymity-of-my-website-users-5fgb https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-privacy-an... SPOILER: asymmetric encryption with private/public keys.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y agoAs 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.
- waterlink 7y agoLegislating 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.
- hiram112 7y ago> 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.
- astura 7y agoThere's far too many LARPers online for me to take any self reported salary info seriously.
- gfs78 7y agoIf 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.
- waterlink 7y agoI’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.
- mscasts 7y agoNothing on this page is clickable for me, it seems like the "cookie banner" is invisible and taking up the entire page.
- waterlink 7y agoAre 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).
- mscasts 7y agoWell, I use pi-hole and uBlock Origin. But uBlock doesn't block anything so it must be the pi-hole for some reason? Do you use some third party script or something?
- waterlink 7y agoNo 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…
- Proven 7y ago> your HR gonna hate this 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.
- davidcollantes 7y agoIt shows as a series of images for me under macOS Safari. Nothing responds to clicks, as in, nothing is clickable.
- oneeyedpigeon 7y agoHave you dismissed the cookie dialog at the bottom of the page?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ojagodzinski 7y agoDoesn't work with Adblock enabled. Adblock by default block shitty cookie popups and without clicking accept i can't log in (and there is no info about mandatory cookie accepting thing).
- oneeyedpigeon 7y agoWorks for me with ublock origin. FWIW, although I also detest cookie popups (particularly this one, which looks wholly unnecessary), this one is less shitty than most. The customisation page actually looks pretty useful.
- waterlink 7y agoThank you! I also detest these popups and "usual" customization pages. If you think I can improve it even more, please tell me! :)
- waterlink 7y agoThis is actually quite strange because I coded the cookie banner myself, so I’m confused as to why Adblock would block that.
- ryanmercer 7y agoHR won't care at my employer. There is no negotating a salary, there is no asking for a raise. There is a base amount that everyone gets, period, when they hire in and then your annual merit increase (the years we get one) is 0-3% and rarely does anyone even get close to 3%. All you have to do is ask someone how long they've been here, take the lowest number of the salary range for their position then multiply that by 1.02 or 1.03% for each year they've been here and you've got a pretty good idea of what they make. Each step up the ladder is a set % too so even if someone gets a higher position (when one rarely opens up, usually when someone quits) you still know about what they are making. And my parent company employs what, like half a million people... nearly all of which have similar pay brackets.
- abraCadabstrax 7y agoHi there. Your page asked to accept cookies twice on Firefox Dev edition.
- waterlink 7y agoIt’s probably because of different domains (main production web app, and demo web app)?
- stevev 7y agoOne issue with static data is that it’ll rise and fall. Salaries today may be different in the future. You would have to continually receive data to have the latest up to date changes. Many variables affects the data; age, location, experience, availability, opportunity etc. therefore your data starts to look more like a range, rather than just a number. In the past, for the same role, company a will only pay this much, whereas company b is willing to negotiate; this is changing. The problem has already been partially solved. Two companies comes to mind; one stands out by far imo.
- jve 7y ago> Hi there . I use cookies to make this website work (i.e., signup and login). Only essential cookies are being used, without which the application won’t work. No ads, no tracking, no pixels, no 3rd-parties involved ... Per GDRP, you are not required to consent if you only use essential cookies. > Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user. https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ Nice that you explain (GDPR site recommends that), however preventing interaction with site (and generating confisuion as we see in commenets) is overkill IMO.
- waterlink 7y agoAwesome, thank you. I’m going to take that into account. On the other hand, I wanted to be super-transparent with my users. Because, I still see a lot of websites out there having "necessary" cookies, and website works without accepting the popup, and users unknowingly accept "by default" a lot of third-party tracking cookies, which makes me sad :(
- emrhzc 7y agothe only way to achieve reliability would come from comparing the actual salaries of a set of big enough companies with what their employees have actually volunteered to share and more importantly which ones. Only then you would be able to actually measure how all the human factors are affecting the outcome and then perhaps generalize it to real world. so the issue needs a scientific research, not another zuckerberg.
- cmdshiftf4 7y agoI struggle to understand the motivation behind publicly sharing one's own salary, especially with one's own coworkers. It seems to be primarily a movement of low achievers trying to cripple the progress of high achievers, or falsely lay claim to the same rewards as them. It seems to be a rather meak attempt at collective bargaining without the resolve to collectively organize, and I don't see it working out well for anyone involved.
- gdy 7y ago'primarily a movement of low achievers trying to cripple the progress of high achievers, or falsely lay claim to the same rewards as them.' People have different negotiating skills and different level of information about job market. Knowing how much other people get paid for the same job can be an incentive to renegotiate one's salary or change an employer. Removing part of information asymmetry allows to sell your work for the money closer to its real market price.
- cmdshiftf4 7y agoThere are too many variables involved to determine a real market price for those in tech product engineering in any meaningful way.
- gdy 7y agoAnd yet that doesn't change anything.
- loph 7y ago"Privacy-focused", but you need to log in with your Linkedin credentials -- what could go wrong? Thanks, but no thanks.
- waterlink 7y agoHold on. You don’t provide LinkedIn credentials in any way to me or to my website. You use it to authorize with LinkedIn (similar way, you can authorize with Facebook, Github, Google, Twitter, and other OAuth platforms). The only thing that my website can read (and for very limited amount of time): - Your email address, - First name and last name, - Unique LinkedIn ID, - LinkedIn profile photo URL. That is it. There is no write permission for anything. This authentication token doesn’t allow anyone to log in into your LinkedIn account. This type of technology is called an Authentication Provider, and is used to authenticate you on my website (not on LinkedIn). Here you can read exactly how I process the data mentioned above: https://www.fellowage.io/privacy#linkedin-profile-data https://www.fellowage.io/privacy#linkedin-profile-data
- codegeek 7y ago"Keep your data anonymous" Even though I personally understand why you are going with Linkedin, you cannot claim that data is anonymous if you require Linkedin account to authenticate. Privacy has nothing to do the with the technical implementation. You are just explaining oAuth but the point is that you already who I am since you require Linkedin. So it is not anonymous. Not for YOU at least.
- waterlink 7y agoIt’s not anonymous in a sense that I’m going to see your linkedin profile. I could have found your profile on my own if I wanted to (that’s what LinkedIn is for in the first place). What’s important is that I’m not going to see the numbers you entered. Also, since I’m verifying every registration (in half-automated/half-manual way), and it takes about 20 seconds to do the verification, I cannot possibly remember who I’ve seen and what profiles do they have. (simply because I’m human). Additionally, what is important is for what purposes you allow me to process your data. And the only purpose for this LinkedIn data is to verify your company name, job title, and location. Once that is done, the data gets removed or disassociated from your account, which means that it can no longer be meaningfully processed (anonymized), and since I don’t have your permission to do any other types of processing—I won’t. EDIT: So what is anonymous are the salary numbers—and that is what I’m talking about on the landing page.
- pc86 7y agoSo against my better judgment I signed up and shared information. Now that you have my data, not only is my account is in a "pending" status, but I can't log in because I get an (obviously incorrect) error that the user doesn't exist. Pretty godawful experience from the start, since the only reason I added my information was to see if there was anything relevant since I do not live or work in a tech hub (quite the opposite). Edit: And it seems like you need to search for companies in order to see them. Browsing companies to see if I recognize any in my area would be a good feature.
- waterlink 7y agoThe user account does not exist yet for pending registrations. It gets created only when registration is accepted. Also, if rejected registration is not updated with correct info in 1 week, it gets automatically deleted. This data does not become part of the information that other users can see. > Browsing companies to see if I recognize any in my area would be a good feature. You are not the first asking for that today. I’ll implement this feature for the next release. > the only reason I added my information was to see if there was anything relevant That also screams like a missing feature for me. I could allow people to browse companies (by location) and show masked data until they sign up and share their own entry.
- waterlink 7y ago1. I have implemented the company browsing feature 2. I have made it available without signup/login (partially—you’ll see companies/locations and how many entries they have each, and be able to navigate to these company pages, but from there to see numbers, you’d need to signup/login).
- mizzao 7y agoI agree with other comments that Glassdoor sucks, but levels.fyi has done a great job so far. Not sure what this does above and beyond that.
- dannydannydanny 7y agoWhy do I need to connect with linked and log in again? Also why are the password rules so absurd? Inb4 [dumb-password-rules](https://github.com/dumb-password-rules/dumb-password-rules https://github.com/dumb-password-rules/dumb-password-rules)
- waterlink 7y agoLinkedIn is used only to verify your information (current job title, company name and location). Then the password requirements are strong because it is used for encryption of your critical private data in the system. The same reason is why you need to login with your account ID (email) and password.
- thiey 7y agoIn Sweden you can just call the tax office anonymously and ask how much John Doe earned last year.
- allgreen 7y agometa: people who want to know salaries of their peers and demand equality have a bit a wrong view on companies. Companies are anything but not about equality, playing fair or being nice to employees. Paying your staff different salaries is crucial and key to run a stable organization. Most won't get why different salaries on the same level create a stable organization, it's complex and would need an extensive/scientific article. An organization's owner's goal is not to make the individual one happy but rather keeping the entire org on a good track. This involves keeping salaries inequal. Maybe some of you have an educated guess on why inequality creates downright stability.
- bonecrusher2102 7y agoIf you don't understand it well enough to summarize with some brevity, you don't understand it.
- allgreen 7y agogood try man, but to get a full understanding you need to get deep into organizational theory/system theory or have already the background which I doubt most have here. Again, it would be a longer post, which would lead to a debate because of some unpopular opinions involved and I just don't have the time. Educating you doesn't pay my rent. But you are smart, check out the hints I just gave and write down your guess and be brief (as you requested yourself). People would appreciate this. edit: thanks for the downvotes
- vpmpaul 7y agoThe main issue I have with these sites is that they are relatively pointless. The really only are able to cover low and mid level position salaries. Those salaries are not generally very elastic anyway and you can get pretty close to the the salary info from public stats anyway. This makes the site pretty much useless for those jobs. If you are the Director of AI/Machine learning (or CFO or whatever) at some company there are probably only you or you and one other person that ever had that job. By providing the salary you are outing yourself anyway and risking some sort of action against you. Anyone looking to move into these good jobs has no use for the site either. This is the real problem glassdoor had/has and why it will eventually disappear or become nothing but ads or headhunter style site.
- kottalovag 7y agoI tried to contribute but CHF is not accepted, it claims xurrency should be filled.
- ghjdyfl 7y agoThe site is pretty broken. I tried "USD", "$", etc. and nothing works "Currency Required!" error. and there is no dropdown like claimed on the other comment.
- bradgnar 7y agolevels.fyi is still legit
- PretzelFisch 7y agoThere are companies that collect and sale employee information such as "the work number" they provide verification of employment as well as salary. Has anybody taken this kind of data set to answer these questions rather then surveying for bias mis reported data?
- pnutjam 7y agoI'd love to see a place where people could post the cost of benefits that their employers offer them. In my experience this can vary widely and make a huge difference in the compensation package.
- dnate 7y agoI would strongly suggest to add the option of sharing the salary without sharing the company name. Especially in the early adoption phase: People are probably the first one of their company to share their salary. If their position is somewhat unique, it will effectively not be anonymous.