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I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary inform
by michaelteter 3y ago
I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic.
And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading.
Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the salary column it will show a number which is designed to suggest a number of salary data elements available. Honestly I cannot say what that number actually means as it seems to have no value at all. Specifically, it will say 5 or 8 or some other small but non-zero number... and yet there are zero visible salary records for the company (even if you are a contributor of information and thus deemed to be allowed to view other information on the site).
I expect Glassdoor is like the many dating sites on the internet - full of fluff and false/artificial information so the site appears to be valuable and worth visits.
If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoWhen I search a job, I'd like to know both work environment and the salary, in the end both are really important
- sahila 3y agohttps://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ is a grest site for actual salary information on tech related jobs. The data reported very much matched my last round of interviews and the data granularity is good, being able to see levels, location, pay breakdowns, and even dates when the salary was posted.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoWhy are people downvoting this? Glassdoor numbers are BS and levels.fyi is extremely accurate.
- ryandrake 3y agoAren't all these sites limited by (and biased by) the selection of offer data they collect? Unless they are working directly with payroll companies to obtain a uniformly random sampling of offers, they're not going to be accurate. What incentivizes employees who get below-average offers and companies who give below-average offers to share that data with these salary sites? Example: Everyone who even knows someone who makes $500K at Facebook seems to love posting about it here, but nobody who makes $100K there seems to feel the need to boast about it.
- yamazakiwi 3y agoThat's a reasonable distinction but just look at the data itself. There are tons of low level employees posting their salaries. If you work in those roles, that data could be more valuable to a candidate than Glassdoor's amorphous projections. I think the user behavior that facilitates this is the same behavior you see represented on Blind.
- CSMastermind 3y agoLevels allows HR departments to post their actual salary bands, which they're normally more than happy to do. So you're not just relying on user reported data. They're also incentivized to do it because they want compensation benchmarking information (big companies want to know how much their competitors are paying so they can calibrate their own bands to market rate). https://www.levels.fyi/offerings/ https://www.levels.fyi/offerings/ They also have users upload W2s, offer letters, and supporting documents in addition to proof of identity. https://www.levels.fyi/verified/ https://www.levels.fyi/verified/ They have their own job advertisement business and they partner with third party recruiting companies to get anonymous data about offers candidates receive. They also just take having accurate compensation information seriously so they do things like outlier and forgery detection as well as seeming to have a much better algorithm for processing the information they receive.
- willis936 3y agoThis seems like a very nice tool if you are a capital case SWE. There is no similar analog for more general engineering positions.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI have found that the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics is a comprehensive and unparalleled treasure trove of current, accurate salary information, and much much more. (US jobs only, natch.) https://www.bls.gov/ https://www.bls.gov/
- c_elegant 3y agoBLS is a tremendous resource but how are you using information at the NAICS-level to inform jobseeking or job hiring? It seems fascinating from an aggregate point of view but less useful for pricing employment positions.
- JohnFen 3y ago> I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. It's possible, but I know that salary information isn't at all what I'm interested in learning from such sites.
- willis936 3y agoI saw a glassdoor salary range for a job at my company. I know that the internal range is 50-100% higher than what glassdoor suggests. And then I wonder why no one's applying. Companies should just publicly advertise compensation.