
Anonymously Post/Compare Startup Salary & Equity Offers - philfreo
http://www.ackwire.com/
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jacquesm
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.

downmodders: you're clueless.

~~~
rdl
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...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-employees-
negotiate-pay-raises.html) 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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
rdl
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.

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cletus
This information would be valuable. Unfortunately, getting such information
_reliably_ is incredibly difficult.

If life has taught me nothing else it's that people lie about their incomes
_even anonymously_. Plus you have a selection bias to deal with anyway.

Oh and email validation is pretty meaningless.

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rdl
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.

~~~
stevedewald
Perhaps... although there may be little or no correlation between where one
chooses to go to school and how good of an engineer they'll be.

~~~
rdl
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.

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wybo
I don't know if requiring people to enter & verify their e-mail address is
such a good idea for anonymity... (it is for data quality).

~~~
jbryanscott
The data is meaningless if it can't be trusted. Email addresses are stored
encrypted and will always be kept confidential.

~~~
swombat
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.

~~~
jbryanscott
"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.

~~~
roel_v
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.

~~~
rdl
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...)

~~~
swombat
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.

~~~
rdl
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.

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yannickmahe
I'm currently negotiating for a director level post... This confirms what I
thought : way too low !

I'll wait for more data, but this is a great help for me !

~~~
keyle
It's not all about the money too. There is happiness at work, prospects,
experience gain, distance from home, day to day...

At least that's what I found from the highest paying jobs I got.

~~~
jister
depends. if you're single then that be great but if you have a family then
that's another story.

~~~
dagw
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.

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rdl
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)

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elbrodeur
I'm a little suspicious of this dataset.

$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.

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wazoox
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 ...

~~~
roel_v
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).

~~~
Confusion
Only his point seems to be that you should compare the gross salary before
_employers_ taxes.

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brown9-2
As others have said, it's not "compleetely anonymous" if you are supplying an
email address.

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paradox95
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.

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rdl
For data quality, you should probably provide definition by example for the
level (director vs. Vp vs. Senior can be ambiguous in early stages)

~~~
jbryanscott
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"

~~~
kleinsch
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.

~~~
rdl
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.

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leppie
Does 'Engineering' imply software developers too, or is there just no software
development in these startups?

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chucknthem
It'll be interesting to see when the startup was founded too, but I guess that
would make it less anonymous

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rwhitman
Hmm... Industry = "Group Buying", Location = "Chicago", Valuation = ">$10B"

I'd say Groupon pays pretty darn well, huh?

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kenkyhuang
bug report: clicking 51-100 employees doesn't filter correctly; filters list
on 1-10 instead

~~~
kenkyhuang
also, sorting the headcount column sorts alphabetically and not as you
probably intended

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bluekite2000
why do you need to supply an email? Is that even necessary? Most people will
fake it anyway

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nolite
it would be nice if they had fields for the hire number (1st employee, 2nd,
etc..)

~~~
jbryanscott
I try to capture this with the Headcount field. Don't want to get too specific
though, in order to preserve anonymity.

~~~
biot
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.

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sktrdie
What about spammers?

