Don't do this without very good guarantees that your data is not going to be tied to your identity somehow, you could be a in a lot of hot water for disclosing this stuff.
Sorry to rain on the parade but this is not a good idea.
If you do decide to go through with it use a proxy and a throwaway email address.
As an employer, I wouldn't be particularly displeased by an employee revealing information like this anonymously (although I agree you should definitely not do so in a way which can be tied to you, just in case).
There is (some) justification in not identifying salary data within a specific company, to avoid jealousy and unproductive behaviors. At this level, it's not much more detailed than "how much do you make" on a loan application.
I don't think an employer has much right to try to pay the same people differential salaries based on their negotiating skill (at least for engineering/non-sales positions). There is a good argument for being 100% open with salaries and equity internally, at least in terms of ranges for given positions with given levels of experience. Joel on Software, http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-em... I'm seriously considering doing "opt in to having your salary/equity public within the company", and Strongly Encouraging any senior person to do this; I think seeing a CEO making ~$60k and early engineers making $80k or so would help avoid runaway $140k for junior developers salary inflation, and I'd value my equity a lot more highly at a company where I saw the founders were still mainly motivated by equity upside vs. cash compensation.
Even at the granularity of per-employer salary stats (which Glassdoor type sites do), there is a net benefit to everyone in knowing that e.g. Netflix pays a 30-50% cash salary premium over Facebook, and that Twitter is particularly stingy with equity (relative to valuation) compared to other tech companies. If I were trying to hire people at Twitter, I'd be annoyed to be wasting my time with candidates who wanted >0.1% equity for anything but super-senior engineering positions, and I'd be sad if I were hiring at Netflix and people didn't know about the great cash component in deciding to apply.
If your first interaction with a company is them trying to mislead and/or fuck you through inaccurate perceptions and lack of information, this does not bode well.
Agreed in general. But: this form asks for your email address, if you post from your corporate IP the company is known, if you add in all the rest of the data then the company might identifiable as well, if you have posted stuff in fora from your email account and tied it in to your corporate identity then that can be put together. After all, how many companies with between 'x' and 'y' employers in such and such an area making profit with a market cap of 'z' have active members on HN.
You're not nearly as anonymous as you think you are and this is very juicy data.
On the whole transparency is a good thing but this is probably not the best way to go about achieving it.
A lot of university hiring offices collect this level of stats (although in less useful form) from recent graduates, and often republish.
Post from home, use a throwaway email address or at least a gmail-type address vs. @palantir.net work address, is probably enough. The most personally detrimental leak would probably be "I work for Yahoo and am currently interviewing with Google and Facebook" vs. that Google and Facebook extended specific offers, and in that case, you're already trusting the HR departments, recruiters, etc.
I put my information in there and before I submitted I realized that with a little Googling and homework you could find out exactly who I was. No thanks.
clueless here: (I mean, I didn't downmod you; If it's worth responding it's worth not downmoding, but I am 'clueless')
what would be the consequences of disclosing your salary data? I've always been pretty open about what I've made personally, and while being open with the wrong people or the wrong situation can make you look pretty crass, what are the real consequences? Are people often fired for disclosing what they make? are they sued?
I mean, I have a hard time imagining a large company taking the time to sue some $100K/year lackey over bragging about his salary, or even firing the guy.
I guess I can imagine a small company firing over something like that, but again, anything more? seems unlikely.
I mean, the quotes I get for co-location or bandwidth all claim they are 'proprietary data' and not to be disclosed, but people still pass numbers around, and nothing comes of it besides an annoyed salesperson.
An extension of this which would be even more socially beneficial would be "graduate of x degree program and y university job offer stats"; ideally with some kind of actually trusted third party going over legitimate offer letters.
This data could be blinded at the level of industry or role (and thus not commercially sensitive to any employer), and then published to prospective students; knowing that Bentley College majors in Communications are offered $20-40k while Stanford CS graduates are offered $70-140k would be exceptionally useful to everyone, much more so than the 5-year graduation rates which I think universities taking certain federal financial aid programs are required to disclose.
This is much more relevant outside SW engineering/internet. Knowing about law schools, medical schools, etc., or different types of degree, would be useful for a lot of otherwise uninformed students taking on debt.
That's nice, but you get to know all the details and link them up to people. You might end up meeting those people in networking events, or being asked about those people.
What's to stop you from making use of that data?
I'm not attacking your character or suggesting you will make use of the data, but it's a pretty tempting pool of data to sneak a look into. "Oh, so-and-so at Twitter earns that much, interesting. Holy crap, I met this guy last week, I had no idea he got screwed so badly by his current startup. Huh, looks like startup X has a fair bit of money."
A lot of this is actionable data. If the startup has IPOed, you might even fall under insider trading regulations and need to make sure you don't trade on it. On a purely ethical level, you might want to consider what sort of level of access you should have to the data.
Finally, there is, of course, the possible issue that someone might offer you a tidy sum of money to buy that data off you, once there's enough of it.
I would not advise anyone to put their data in there as this stands.
Probably the bigger risk is that another person will find this data appetizing and hack the server. Seeing that this is a relatively small service, it's probably not very hard for a determined person to get in, even if that means waiting until a zero-day is released and hitting before the owner gets a chance to patch.
"What's to stop you from making use of that data?"
The vision of Ackwire is to make startup compensation data transparent to prospective employees and employers.
Email addresses are encrypted and stored in a different database. It's true that they aren't hard to manually access, but this presents a reasonable barrier.
The same argument applies to any web service that stores personal information. I'm sure there are administrators at Facebook, Gmail, etc. who could read all your private messages, view your photos, etc. But we assume they don't, and most of us use these services anyway.
"A lot of this is actionable data. If the startup has IPOed, you might even fall under insider trading regulations and need to make sure you don't trade on it."
I'm not a securities lawyer, but this doesn't seem to pass the material non-public test. Significant shareholders in a public company already have to disclose their holdings, publicly.
"Finally, there is, of course, the possible issue that someone might offer you a tidy sum of money to buy that data off you, once there's enough of it."
I think this is jumping the gun a bit, but any buyer would have to keep the current user agreement intact (posts are confidential and anonymous) or explicitly ask users to opt into the new terms.
I think the point of the OP was that there is no mechanism in place to enforce your promises. It basically asks people to just trust some guy on the internet that they've never seen or met and most likely never will, and who may or may not be who he says he is. I don't have an answer, I just think it's a valid concern and if your only response is 'oh but I won't do that', well to me that shows that you don't understand the actual concern.
If the operator of Ackwire used this data in sufficiently malicious ways, I think there would be potential civil liability (at least enough to bring a credible suit; maybe not to win).
I wouldn't trust a random person with this data, but I'd trust a member of a somewhat-meritocratic community like hackernews or quora, university alumni association, etc. It's fairly clear why this data is being collected, what is being done with it, and my potential downside risk is fairly capped. At some point, being overly paranoid is too much of a cost.
Yes, a technical solution to this class of problem would be preferable to social trust. (and is one of the things I'm working on, actually...)
I think you're not being paranoid enough. The "HN member" in question has a karma of 18 (yes, karma does count), and I don't recognise his username.
The questions you need to ask yourself is:
1) is there any potential downside whatsoever to submitting my data here? If this data is on the front page of the new york times tomorrow, and everyone I know knows it, do I stand to lose anything because of it?
2) is there any real upside to submitting my data here? (seeing other people's data has obvious upsides)
Unless 2 is clearly bigger than 1, submitting your salary info here is an irrational decision.
Actually, I mixed up the submitter and the creator (892 vs. 18); I agree I'd trust someone I recognized as a member of the community more than others, but I still think hn-member alone is worth something. So, I don't disagree with you.
Encrypted email addresses don't need to be broken, all you need to do is run the addresses using the same hashing algorithm against a set of known addresses to see which ones pop up. Plenty of HN'ers have their email addresses out in the open.
If email addresses are stored 'encrypted' how can they be kept 'confidential', you store them for a reason or you don't need to store them at all, hashed or not.
What gain do you have from storing the hashed address?
If I were creating the service, I'd want the email or some other "is an actual credible person" credential, but wouldn't store it afterward. Referrer being hackernews might actually be sufficient to not require email.
The best credential would be something like "is a member of FB or LinkedIn with a sufficiently filled in profile" but nothing personally identifying.
For the traditional version of this (alumni association stats), you have a trusted third party (the association), or restricting access to people on 18.0.0.0/8 or who have kerberos credentials, although logging anything personally identifying.
By collecting email addresses and verifying them, users are explicitly _not_ anonymous. If it was truly anonymous, even you wouldn't know who they are.
Anyway, it's the easiest thing in the world to create a throwaway email account, so the data still can't be trusted.
Discussions about salary compensation are so dishonest on this site. Everyone is so quick to say "its not about the money", yet it's easily proven to be the single biggest factor in any job. If your compensation were 0, literally 0, you wouldn't take it no matter how great it was. However, there are other benefits you could do without assuming everything else checked out.
When your compensation is above a certain threshold other factors begin to weigh more. The only difference between people is where that threshold starts. This should be obvious, and thus renders these posts completely moot.
I'm only ranting here because any honest discussion about salary always gets short-circuited by the "it's not about the money" folks. It's frustrating, and at this point it adds nothing to the discussion.
I have a family and still consider the money I minor part in the whole job choosing scheme. A minimum of overtime and no weekends and reasonable vacation days so that I actually can spend time with my family is much more important to me. As is having a boss who doesn't get pissy if I have to stay home to take care of a sick child now and then.
That depends entirely on whether you married a woman who demanded vacations, jewelry, expensive dinners( e.g. saw you as a walking wallet ), or a woman who actually likes you for who you are.
In my case, what I'm considering is either this post or starting my own company. With the "other factors" close to equivalent (at least in my opinion), money remains a pretty big differentiator.
We have TheFunded for VC/Angel investors, stuff like Glassdoor and this for compensation, and CPM/traffic/etc. are fairly well established through compete and other sources, and it would be great to see a few more anonymous data pools:
1) Non-employee costs (offices in SoMA and PA/MV, insurance, anything sold in a non-transparent market)
2) Sales cycles and cash to cash time (how long does it take for initial interest to become cash in the bank account for various types of product and market)
$122k + 3.5% for a mid level product manager who joined Q1, 2011 at (presumably) Groupon?
$320k + 1.5% for a C-level bizdev who joined Q1, 2011 at Groupon?
5% of equity to late entry employees at a company where, presumably, first employees have been diluted into sub .5% ranges seems not just ridiculous, but impossible. I mean, they just closed a series G for crying out loud -- they don't have 5% to throw at new employees.
Unless of course there are other group buying startups in Chicago with a valuation greater than $10bn that I haven't heard of.
Valuation and Headcount are supposed to reflect the valuation and headcount of the company when the offer was received.
These offers with large equity grants (>1%) at very high valuation companies were likely received when the valuations were lower.
I message this on the Add page, and most people follow it. It looks like a few people didn't in the examples you cite.
I need to do a better job of messaging this on the Add page and add validation on the Add page to calculate Valuation * Equity = Dollar Value of Grant.
It may be pretty hard to compare US and foreign offers. For instance, in France, you'd be earning 36000 euros in cash --what's landing on your account --, however it would actually be nearly 48000 euros with charges (that's what you're taxed for): social security, retirement, etc. Then the company will actually pay some 20000 more euros in other salary charges. That means that 36000 euros in cash in France translate to (36000 (cash) + 32000 (charges)) * 1.30 = about US$ 90000 ...
That's the same everywhere (well the extent varies, but not by the margin you suggest), which is why you should quote your gross pay (i.e. the amount before deduction of social security, pension and related costs). On top of that there's extra costs for the company obviously, but those are not 'wages'. Quoting the gross salary is standard here in the Netherlands because the amount that is left after taxes varies depending on personal circumstances. In the Netherlands (and Belgium and to the best of my knowledge France) the contributions are withheld by the company, in the US you pay them yourself. Quoting the gross salary makes for the best comparison (not perfect, but better than stating net pay, i.e. the amount you are paid each month - that number is in this context meaningless).
The rule of thumb in the U.S. is that the company is paying about double your actual salary in taxes, administration, and benefits. That doesn't seem all that different from the French example...
Wow, double of the gross salary?
So a company paying me $80k (out of which I have to pay taxes and I net let's say $60k), actually pays $160k? Seems like a LOT to me.
In Italy it's around 1,46x the gross salary.
A productive employee costing double salary, fully loaded, includes a benefit and other direct load (employer FICA, UI, 401k and health insurance, ...), plus share of supervisors, plus facilities. i.e. a team of 5 developers requires maybe one full time equivalent manager making roughly the same or slightly more, who also has his own benefits, office space, etc. And his own manager, etc. (assuming a reasonable span of control, like 5-10:1 manager)
I usually use 1.3x for "direct loaded cost" and maybe 1.5x for facilities and loaded cost. In a "below market compensation" environment, like a startup, the loaded costs are usually higher (if you pay yourself $30k at a startup, you still probably want the same quality health insurance as if you pay yourself $60 or $100k, unless you're young and single and get an HSA/catastrophic coverage).
Including supervisors and other operational staff into an employee's fully loaded cost makes sense for project billing purposes where the cost of supporting that engineer's work must be taken into consideration. For the purpose of this discussion, that must get excluded since offer letters don't state salary that way.
But my French example doesn't include administration, office, power... Only the salary and directly related taxes and contributions (social security, unemployment taxes, pensions make the most of it).
Would be nice if the column headers could act as filters rather than just sortable. I wanna see just postings in SF Bay Area, Pre-Rev, and Engineering. I don't care about all the other stuff.
Good point. Generally, Senior is the most experienced title for an employee without direct reports, e.g. Senior Engineer. Lead, Director and VP usually entail direct reports, e.g. a Lead Engineer or "Engineering Lead"
Right, but sometimes you hire someone as "Director of Engineering" with only contractors or even zero staff, at a 1-10 person startup, on the assumption that he will add direct reports later.
I really prefer hiring people as individual contributors and then promoting them, with "employee #5" or something being enough "status" to get a Director or VP at a larger company (who is still a great individual contributor himself) to accept the position.
Plus, a lot of more tech-heavy companies have somewhat parallel technical vs. management tracks, with Senior going to maybe Lead (who doesn't necessarily have reports, and may just be a tech leader, supported by a product manager), going up to maybe a Fellow or CTO or Chief Scientist; this is parallel to pure-administrative managers (PM) or hybrid Director of Engineering/Engineering Group types who then become VP Engineering.
Honestly I find few things more pathetic than a startup with 5-10 people and a CTO, VP Engineering, CIO, CEO, COO, ...; probably the best at a 1-10 person company is to skip the title entirely (except for CEO) and just specify job role, like "Engineering" "Product" "Server Operations"; let the individual contributor vs. manager roles follow in time.
Figuring out some way to title-ify "employee #5, first full-time back end engineer" would be cool; "Founding Engineer" as one-step down from Founder might work. There should be some way to compensate employees 1-n (n=5-15) at a startup with title in addition to equity in a way which still allows people with management experience or specific domain expertise to maybe come in above in the hierarchy later.
I worked for a company where there were a bunch of Engineering Leads with no direct reports. Makes no sense, I realize, but titles rarely do. You might want to make that a checkbox.
I'm used to engineering lead vs. manager being "leads technology" vs. "leads team" within a group, so an engineering lead should never have direct reports.
Sometimes the engineering lead is sort of a mentor to junior members of the team, too, and it can be training for becoming a manager. It would be unusual for an engineering lead to be responsible for HR-type management of Senior Engineers, at least at every place I've worked.
Along these lines, it would be great to have at least country-level information instead of "Outside US". Otherwise, data on the UK is indistinguishable from data on Cambodia, for example.
Sorry to rain on the parade but this is not a good idea.
If you do decide to go through with it use a proxy and a throwaway email address.
downmodders: you're clueless.