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Four 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?
by cletus 7y ago
Four 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 agoI, 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. Yelp themselves have addressed this with a dedicated page: https://www.yelp.com/extortion 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.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoThat 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.
- dmitrygr 7y agoI 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...
- keymone 7y agoAll these claims are publicly testable using web archives to build stats about review approval speed. Did you verify these claims?
- dqv 7y ago>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? [0]: https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Can-I-copy-or-scrape-data-from-the-Yelp-site?l=en_US https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Can-I-copy-or-scrape-da...
- propogandist 7y agoWow, I didn't realize they operated like yelp. Are they hiding reviews or removing them outright?
- Benjammer 7y agoA 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).
- daxaxelrod 7y agoGood old extortion
- crsv 7y agoExtortion as a service.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoTo 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.
- waterlink 7y agoSo which one Glassdoor is then? Do they allow companies to hide/improve reviews for premium pay? Or is it just additional features of the platform without altering the review data?
- waterlink 7y agoThis 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?
- nautilus12 7y agoIf 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.
- zamfi 7y agoI think the OP is referring to "big tech" as in mostly public companies.
- cletus 7y agoOptions 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.
- teddyuk 7y agoI lie anonymously because I want to put the average up so we all get paid more :)
- waterlink 7y agoI quite like that idea!
- pc86 7y agoThis seems particularly ineffective when compared to more direct options like having a good BATNA and improving your negotiation skills.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bsanr2 7y agoAlso, being a white man. (This will be flagged for offending sensibilities, not because it's untrue. (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/13/study-black-employees-get-lower-offers-during-salary-negotiations.html 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.)
- Humdeee 7y agoNo 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.
- pc86 7y agoDiscussing 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.
- dboreham 7y agoSmall nit: self employed people likely won't have a W-2. They would have other ways to prove income though such as their 1040.
- pc86 7y agoThis seems at best orthogonal to the real point.
- waterlink 7y ago1. 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.
- cletus 7y ago> 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.
- waterlink 7y agoYes, 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.
- jacquesm 7y agoGlassdoor = Yelp for HR.
- commandlinefan 7y ago> One thing I've learned over the year is that people lie, even anonymously. How do you know?
- slumdev 7y ago> 1. How is this different to Glassdoor? 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.