
Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours - titusblair
http://honestsalary.com/
======
siliconc0w
I'd make this site more focus about apples to apples comparison within the
same company. I.e 'Share your salary at X and invite your colleagues to do the
same'. So people could go to honestsalary.com/company and collaborate there
with the main page showing the aggregate.

And maybe instead of job title use department and 'level' to make it more
ambiguous. I.e engineering,marketing,operations or 'associate, sr, manager,
director, vp, cto'.

The problem with title is that with small companies title alone isn't
ambiguous enough. Yeah yeah I know it's technically illegal for a company to
retaliate but that is being a bit naive. Some companies will - the law is
pretty toothless here and there are plenty of ways to subtly do it.

Also use HTTPS. For obvious reasons.

Otherwise i'm a fan and I was actually looking for an something similar the
other day.

~~~
anonsalarylol
Here's the source for a small webapp to anonymously share your salary with a
pool of others:
[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/894b151cc981f783e3af](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/894b151cc981f783e3af)
I did try to make most of the selections ambiguous in order to better preserve
anonymity. The way it works is that the pool creator sets a minimum number of
responses before anyone can see the salary info. You also can't see any salary
info unless you yourself have submitted.

I made it a while back for people trying to understand tech salaries in a
particular area. It's not geared towards startups but maybe someone can modify
it.

~~~
anonsalarylol
One thing I forgot to mention is that the app is based around sharing unique
URLs; there's no need for users to create accounts of any sort.

------
mpeg
Okay, before you all start adding your data there, consider the fact that it's
all made public.

In the UK, post codes are usually very specific (sometimes to a single
building) and I'm seeing someone from Colindale that has put in their entire
postcode alongside their salary, this would be very easy to deanonimise by
doing a reverse lookup on census data and then checking the job titles of the
full names you'd get for software professionals (for instance, via Linkedin or
Facebook).

In that specific example, I was able to find the social profiles of the person
who added their salary with just a couple searches in the UK open register;
ironically, a data engineer.

~~~
marssaxman
Well, sure, but really, so what? I understand that we historically have a
culture in which salary figures are secret, but that all seems to come from a
bunch of social-hierarchy stuff about keeping up appearances and saving face.
If someone doesn't care about that then what harm could even potentially come
about as a result of sharing useful information with peers?

~~~
vitd
It could be a problem at companies where salaries are under an NDA. If the
companies find out you broke the NDA you could get fired. I'm pretty sure my
company has such a clause.

~~~
marssaxman
I think I would enjoy the experience of daring assholes like that to fire me.

~~~
300bps
If they're smart they'll just find a legal reason to fire you. Ever surf the
web for personal reasons at work? Every use your personal mobile on work time?
There are so many rules that people violate every day without repercussion
until the company needs a reason to get rid of them.

~~~
marssaxman
If they're smart and they want you gone, they won't bother with petty stuff
like that. They'll just run you through the formal process, six months of PEP
then PIP then fired, speaking the ritual words and performing the ritual
ceremonies necessary to generate a paper trail that will comfort the lawyers,
all tied up and neat. You'll know exactly what happened but there'll be
nothing you can prove.

If they're smart and they want you to stay, they still won't bother with petty
stuff like that, because firing people is expensive and hiring them even more
so; they'll either look the other way or find a diplomatic way to deal with
it.

------
nhumrich
Am I the only one that feels shaky sharing my salary? I work at a start up and
if I share my position and company it won't really be anonymous, as I am the
only person at the company with that position. I do agree its nice for people
to post their salaries so i know if I'm underpaid. But what if I'm overpaid,
or at least played more than most at my company? What will that do to people I
work with who find or how much I'm paid? It makes me a little uneasy to think
my friends might find out I make more than them, I don't really want to flaunt
my pay. I'm not saying I am overpaid, but that is the thought that gets in my
way from sharing my salary on sites like this and glassdoor. I always assumed
because of this salaries on glassdoor where scewed to the lower spectrum. Am I
alone in this?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Ultimately salary transparency is actually a net positive. You can easily know
if you're over or under paid and all groups (gender, ethnicity, etc) can see
how their pay compares to the other groups.

Yes there is a pain point that you mention when transitioning to such
transparency. If the company hasn't been typically fair with salaries or not
properly explaining why person X isn't getting Y then it's not going to be
fun. But overall it should give you a better position to negotiate a higher
salary when you're underpaid and it makes everyone well aware if
discrimination is happening.

I'll tell anyone who asks. I don't publicize because most people I work with
are really uncomfortable with it but personally I don't care and I think
ultimately, as a society, we're going to _move_ in that direction. It's just
going to take a long time.

~~~
jeremyt
I disagree.

The problem here is that every company has above average performers, average
performers, and below average performers. However, almost everyone thinks they
are an above average performer.

Therefore, if salaries are shared, at least two thirds of your workers are
liable to be pissed off at what they are making, even though the amount is
completely fair based on their actual worth to the company.

~~~
toolz
Transparency solves that problem. If below average workers moved from business
to business getting paid less than their peers, how long do you think they
would consider themselves better than average?

~~~
jeremyt
Possibly forever, and I think it's very likely they develop a chip on their
shoulder because the world is not properly valuing their skills.

Never underestimate the ability of people to come up with all kinds of reasons
why they are being treated unfairly.

~~~
toolz
I think that's a negative bias. The majority of people behave rationally and
while they may speak negatively in public, internally they will understand the
pattern.

We have a tendency to put too much value in what people say rather than how
they act. I'm confident actions would reflect people understanding their value
in a transparent world, even if their words did not.

------
TheRealDunkirk
Just posted this to the other discussion, but it bears just the same.

This is just going to be a collection of anecdotes from people who self-select
to report because they feel good about where they're at, or because they feel
righteously justified in complaining about their situation. Self-selection
ruins the data. The responses have to be random to be useful. And the silly
thing is that most people who are involved in this business know this.

~~~
CydeWeys
My company had a similar spreadsheet internally that was self-selected and it
was incredibly useful. I found that I had come in at the low range for my pay
band and got a $10K raise in the next annual salary review.

It's anonymous. I'm not sure why you think it'd be so susceptible to bragging
or complaining. A lot of people, me included, are data nerds, and will
contribute to the dataset regardless of our personal situation simply because
we want the data to be as accurate as possible.

~~~
vehementi
Since the data was just anecdotes, how did you determine that you were at the
low end, compared to what parent comment pointed out - that people self report
high?

~~~
CydeWeys
I disagree with the parent comment's assumption that such data would
necessarily be inaccurate. I found it to be quite accurate. I know that I and
most of my immediate peers entered our salary data into the spreadsheet, and
all of us did so accurately. There were detailed instructions telling you
which internal website to go to to find out your compensation information, and
the instructions said which values from that to fill into the spreadsheet.

~~~
vehementi
Can you share the methodology of your study where you determined the data to
be accurate?

------
malux85
Hey if the creator is here -- you should write "optional" or mark which fields
are compulsory ... or somehow indicate it's all optional.

I was hesitant to enter the "Employer" details because the combination of all
this info would make me personally identifiable ... I abandoned the site, but
then came back after thinking "maybe it's optional"

most people wouldn't come back!

~~~
titusblair
thanks great feedback it has been updated.

------
Paul_S
Glassdoor already has a bigger pool of salaries and a longer history -
consider contributing there.

------
eitally
Why, just why? Besides Glassdoor, there's now comparably.com (which I also
question), plus Quora and mobile apps like Blind. Imho, Glassdoor is actually
pretty accurate and you can fill in the gaps (things like vesting schedules,
promotion paths, etc) through searching and asking questions on Quora.

~~~
mettamage
Here's a peculiar opinion. I don't have them often, so enjoy ;)

I agree that implementing an idea that is fairly common already has a high
risk of adding only marginal value. I didn't see the website yet, but I was
thinking the same thing "don't we have salary sites already? Why would we need
another one?"

Then I read your comment and to be honest (and peculiar): if all the value
that the website was is having your comment on a HN thread, then it made my
day. I never knew that Quora had salary answers. I never knew about Blind and
comparably.com either.

So your comment, that's why this site should exist. It's a small reason, but a
reason nonetheless. There are other reasons as well but other HNers said them
already and this is the first one that popped into my mind.

To add a few myself that I just learned about:

\- [http://h1bdata.info/](http://h1bdata.info/)

\- [http://visadoor.com/](http://visadoor.com/)

~~~
eitally
And to be honest with you, that is exactly why I made the comment, because I
suspected the OP (and a large fraction of the readership) didn't know about
those (or the h1b search portals).

The comments sections of HN is one of my most valuable news sources. :)

------
gkop
For start up employees, what we really need is compensation tagged with
company stage (seed, series A, series B, and so on). I know private entities
that maintain such a database, so it's definitely doable. If AngelList added
this feature, their database would be extremely useful [0].

Also it would help to ask for the date of the negotiation and allow filtering
salaries by "negotiated in the last 90 days," "negotiated in the last year",
etc..

In the meantime, in SF, the best thing I and my company have found is asking
around our friends... not terribly scalable :/

[0] [https://angel.co/salaries](https://angel.co/salaries)

~~~
derwiki
That AngelList tool is great! Thanks for sharing.

------
hocuspocus
> Please use US dollars, thanks! Free currency converter
> [http://www.xe.com/](http://www.xe.com/)

Ah, too late. And I don't think that's a good idea. Exchange rates vary.
Comparing within a country/region/city makes a lot more sense than across the
world. Let people input their salary in the local currency.

~~~
yitchelle
Agreed, I would seconded the suggestion to keep it to the currency of the
country that you are from. This helps the comparison to be more realistic.

Ie, if I want to compared my salary in two months in the future to the data
that is entered today, the comparison is not useful or accurate due to the
moving currency exchange rate.

------
sosuke
If I were making a good deal more than my peer what do I gain by being fair
and honest. What makes it fair? Why shouldn't I make more or less by the skill
of negotiation?

I've not yet read a reason for the top paid people to talk about their salary.
It seems they would have more to risk than gain and it would hurt them in the
next negotiation.

Not having spoken about my salary I've got no idea if I make more or less. It
only matters if I am happy or not.

~~~
bigtunacan
Why should someone more qualified make less just because they are a bad
negotiator or just unaware of what everyone makes?

Employers typically want this information because as a whole it is in their
favor, not the employees' favor to keep this information from being disclosed.

I have experience working in both the private and public sector.

Private sector salaries (USA) are typically not publicly disclosed and
companies often have policies forbidding disclosure despite laws that say this
is not enforceable.

Public sector typically is disclosed so anyone can just look it up.

My experience has been it is more difficult to negotiate salaries when
salaries are not disclosed. In the negotiation it is very beneficial to show
relative value and say, "I am more productive than 80% of the team, but
getting paid at the median, so I deserve a raise." When salaries are unknown
the company can more easily make claims that they just can't give you a raise
because it wouldn't be fair to everyone else etc... You can always move to a
different company, but if you aren't wanting to make a move that is not
helpful.

~~~
aantix
You really don't want to negotiate against the other open salaries.

Know your worth; if the product you work on brings millions to the table for
the company and you are the lead dev, who gives a rap if your introverted
programming partner is making 100k?

Know your value. Quantify yourself. Negotiate from the value you bring.
Otherwise you're leaving that analysis up to someone else and their offer
certainly isn't going to favor you.

~~~
bigtunacan
Worth is always relative. What metric shall I base it on? If I base it against
the salary of all similarly experienced programmers in the world then it is
lower than if I narrow it to just the United States.

If I narrow it to the United States it may be too high if I live in a smaller
rural area with less jobs and am unwilling to move. Then I can narrow it down
to my region, but then I may undervalue myself as I could always telecommute.

Measuring ones value is always relative and open salaries are to the benefit
of the employee not the employer.

~~~
aantix
Of course it's relative, but your average Joe programmer is going to take the
same strategy, so what, you're going to end up grouped into the pool of
average salaries.

Super. If you're not that great of a programmer, then stop there.

But if you feel like you make a higher contribution, that the very code that
you write is relied upon for generating millions of dollars, why would you
frame the discussion around what Average Joe is making down the hallway? These
numbers don't matter because you're not like them anyway, and it's up to you
to frame your story differently.

Show them the numbers. Get the outlier deal. Then take your family on vacation
to a remote island. Save extra and not work for 6 months.

Get a fucking better than average deal and don't worry about Sad Sally who
can't figure out her own worth to get a descent deal.

------
arjie
The worst kept secret is that lots of H1B application data is not private.
There are many indexers. Here's one
[http://h1bdata.info/](http://h1bdata.info/). And pretty much any tech company
has at least a few H1Bs.

------
bvdbijl
I'm getting a MySQL connection PHP exception, which includes most of the
database password... You probably want to change it

------
CydeWeys
The biggest problem here is that you don't specify whether "Stock Value/Bonus"
is annual. It should be. Otherwise you're going to get all sorts of
inconsistent results.

Signing bonus shouldn't be as prominent as it is. A lot of companies don't do
it, and it doesn't factor into compensation past the first year.

How about an "Other Bonus" field? A lot of people at my company get paid on-
call compensation. It ends up being pretty significant, but absent a field for
it, I'd have to either include it in salary or annual bonus, neither of which
quite feels right.

Oh, and some basic demographics fields that you should add that would help a
lot include age and highest degree awarded (and in what field).

------
buro9
Needs:

1) A currency field to make this globally applicable.

2) Clarification text that salaries are gross, not net.

3) Ability to select some base benefits: health, eye, dental, travel costs,
etc

~~~
CydeWeys
401(k) matching details would be nice. My job has 50% match, no limit, so
that's another free $9K per year on top of my salary, which is quite
significant.

The best way to represent this field would be "How much does the company
contribute per year if you max out your contribution?" And maybe also a field
for number of years to vest. Fortunately my company is 0 for that.

------
victorantos
Checked the "whois" data, the website was put together today I bet in an hour
or two , and it's already on HN frontpage, well done.

What's next?

------
rawnlq
If you're a new grad a good place to look at is your school's salary survey.

For both MIT and CMU with just a BS the median starting salary is 105k (you
have to be bottom half of the class to make less than that!)

[https://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2015-gss-...](https://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2015-gss-
survey.pdf)

Min: $70,000 Max: $185,000 Mean: $106,407

[https://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-
destinations/2015-su...](https://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-
destinations/2015-survey/pdfs-one-pagers/scs-2015-post-grad-
stats-12-17-15-kc.pdf)

Min: $30,000 Max: $150,000 Mean: $103,608

~~~
zump
Who is getting 185k with just a BS from MIT?

~~~
CydeWeys
I'm in New York, where the SWE landscape is a combination of traditional big
tech companies and finance companies. The latter will pay you _a lot_ , but at
the cost of working you to death for it. Finance is not a good field for
anyone who wants a life outside of work. The tech companies seem to do much
better with work/life balance.

------
batz
Let's look at what someone would believe to also believe that sharing their
salary is a good idea.

1\. that if enough people share their salaries, it will cause salaries to
revert to the mean, increasing the equality of outcome, independent of inputs.

2\. that the data will be real, and not sabotaged or cherry picked.

3\. that employers are somehow obligated to pay more than people are willing
to work for, presumably just as you make up the difference from shopping at
whole foods by paying the ethnic grocer an extra few bucks, because justice,
and they're just so grateful, amirite?

4\. People with poor negotiation skills, aka those who have less to offer,
will make more money.

Yay, sample bias. Now I get to know what people stupid enough to share their
salaries earn, which is useless, because if I wanted cogs with minimal value
add, I could offshore the work for less.

Seriously, if an HR person ever used that site as a data point for why they
made a crappy offer I would say, "yes, I can see that's what you would pay
someone with a misunderstanding of how the world works for this job."

Put another way, if you have any doubt about whether someone is overpaid,
don't worry, they'll tell you.

------
a3n
“Anonymized” data really isn’t—and here’s why not
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-
live...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live-online-
in-databases-of-ruin/)

So if you answer this, don't answer honestly, because your employer can
probably ID you with just salary and zip.

------
a_imho
Take aside legal aspects, why wouldn't any employee share their salary with
their peers? All the secrecy just create noise, how could transparency be bad?
I only see some incentive from the company's pov, you can position yourself
somewhat better at bargaining salaries, when your employee has no access to
the same data to debate, thus lowering costs a few percents. What am I
missing?

~~~
hn_user2
If you on the high end of the pay scale, then sharing your information can
hurt you. When it comes time to negotiate a raise, the company could be
reluctant to give you a raise knowing that your peers will also expect a
similar raise.

If you keep your salary a secret, when it comes time to ask for even more
money, then the company could be more likely to offer it since it will not
have repercussions across the whole team.

Selfish? Yeah, probably, but there you have it.

If you are on the low-end, then getting the salary information of others helps
you. If you are on the high-end then it can hurt you (IMHO)--as salaries will
tend to trend to the average if they are public info.

~~~
walshemj
Actualy transparency acts to bid up the going rate for the job you can see
that effect in how CEO pay has increased.

~~~
RodericDay
I read a really interesting account of how public disclosure of lawyer
salaries led to a boom in the 90s.

Finance people also are very brazen about how much they're making, from
accounts I've read.

Doctors too.

------
codeddesign
I really don't understand this. Just in the tech industry, salaries can vary
drastically worth the job title even within a company. For example, as a
senior front-end developer I was able to negotiate a much higher wage than my
counterparts because I had a specific skillet that they were looking for.
Unless you are in a low level position, there are unlimited factors that come
into play at the negotiating table with salaries. One size does not fit all.
Should I not be able to negotiate a higher salary? What if I could bring
something to the table that others could not? Or if I can code 10x faster than
current employees? Or can think outside the box? Should a company not put me
both based upon what I feel I am worth and what they feel that I am worth?
...or is this purely a Silicon Valley gender pay issue?

------
Tasboo
Ha! I've been working on something similar, but as with all of my side
projects, its probably never going to get finished. Good job on getting it out
there. I'm sure HN will rip it to shreds, because they are good at that, but
kudos to getting something out there!

~~~
titusblair
thanks!

------
negrit
There is already a ton of websites to check salaries. Glassdoor is the most
famous one and I made [http://data.jobsintech.io](http://data.jobsintech.io)
last year.

~~~
CydeWeys
The one you made seems completely focused on foreign workers. What am I
missing? At first glance it does not appear to be of any relevance to me.

Also, and this is a usability complaint, but when I'm searching for companies
all of the search results are coming up in all lowercase. This is not a good
user experience. You should style the companies using the same case that they
themselves do. The use of "llc" is particularly bad, as is completely
lowercasing companies whose names are acronyms, e.g. "ibm". See this list for
what I mean:
[http://data.jobsintech.io/companies](http://data.jobsintech.io/companies)

~~~
negrit
Legal foreign workers are required by law to have the same salary than U.S.
workers so it's relevant.

    
    
      >I'm searching for companies all of the search results are coming up in all lowercase. This is not a good user experience. You should style the companies using the same case that they themselves do.

The data come from government records and it's all in uppercase.

~~~
CydeWeys
And murders are illegal by law, so they never happen. There's entire companies
whose raison d'etre is to provide foreign IT labor at cheaper prices. And they
aren't held accountable for it, unlike murders; those at least are generally
followed up on. Here's a source:
[http://www.infoworld.com/article/3004501/h1b/proof-
that-h-1b...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/3004501/h1b/proof-
that-h-1b-visa-abuse-is-rampant-in-tech.html)

By the way, it'd be worth spending some time sanitizing your data so that it
displays correctly. It sucks that the data comes in an annoying format, but it
would still be way more usable if it were fixed, certainly at least the top
several hundred companies. It is interesting data though -- I'm looking up
some data on my previous job, and all of the foreign workers made
significantly less than me. I didn't even realize that this data was available
by law, so nice job on putting it online in a browsable format.

~~~
negrit

      >There's entire companies whose raison d'etre is to provide foreign IT labor at cheaper prices.

Then don't look at those companies. However for example Netflix seem they
foreign employee very well.

    
    
      > And they aren't held accountable for it, unlike murders; those at least are generally followed up on.

That's not true. They are often being investigated. But you're right the
should be punished a lot more.

    
    
      > By the way, it'd be worth spending some time sanitizing your data so that it displays correctly.

I'm already spending a lot of time doing it. The work is massive :)

------
substack
This salary-focused data collection (aside from issues with self-selecting
mentioned elsewhere here) is missing a huge number of freelancers who have
much more variable income from contracts and other kinds of unpredictable
work. Most discussions of wages in tech ignore this rather large cohort that
is difficult to count and often forgotten.

------
alecmgo
[https://twitter.com/talkpay_anon](https://twitter.com/talkpay_anon) provides
similar information in tweet form. People can post anonymously to this account
through [http://talkpaybot.com/](http://talkpaybot.com/).

Disclaimer: A friend and I made this.

------
masukomi
pretty sure that if i put my job title, and years of XP there would be ZERO
question as to WHO at my company was making that amount. hell, if i just put
my job title...

The thinking here is really shortsighted. It only works at companies where
there are LOTS of people and lots of people with the same title.

Not only would it make for uncomfortable conversations at work, it would
likely get me in trouble with my employers. I can't believe you're actually
putting the company names out for people to read when you have SO little data.
there is NO practical level of anonymity here. Lot's of folks can (and
probably will) get in trouble.

------
studentrob
Cool to have another one in case glassdoor disappears or something.. Is the
benefit here that this would show a list of salaries whereas glassdoor shows
averages?

I haven't used glassdoor in awhile but I sort of recall that it checks your
domain. Does this do that too?

~~~
effie
What do you mean by "it checks your domain"? Does it change information
displayed based on where you connect from?

~~~
studentrob
Sorry, email domain. If I work at Bugaboo then verify my email is
rob@bugaboo.com before allowing me to submit a salary for Bugaboo

~~~
effie
Thanks for clarification. That's going to filter out lots of people who don't
want to share their identity, unfortunately.

------
beeboop
Cool site, I added info. It doesn't display as you probably intend it on high
res screens though:
[http://i.imgur.com/2NZZoln.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/2NZZoln.jpg)

------
xofer
The assumption here is that salary is set by forces beyond the employee's
control, and it's either fair or unfair. I would argue that everyone's salary
is fair, b/c it's set at what the employee _negotiated_ for. If you accepted a
salary offer as-is, then that's what you get. If you feel your salary is
unfair, then contact your boss and negotiate for more. I won't get into all
the tactics of negotiation, but it works the same for salary as for a used
car. It will help to have as much leverage as you can get, for example an open
job offer at the salary you want.

------
GigabyteCoin
How do they ensure that their submitters are being honest?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Just like with Glassdoor you're not going to be able to verify. Ideally most
people will be truthful and the fakes will be minimal but all it takes is a
single 4chan "raid" on a new site to populate it with tons of bullshit making
it useless.

Now the site could at least verify email addresses before showing them to
ensure it's not a bot and make people less likely to make up random crap. But
that's still not verifying the input.

~~~
fapjacks
Actually did you see the link on HN the other day? From somewhere like the
Atlantic or something, which had the story about the attack on the UCSD team's
effort to crowdsource-solve a DARPA challenge? Like the whole time they
thought it was a sprawling 4chan raid, but it turned out to just be this one
dude and his other friend that happened to be around that day. Proof positive
that it only takes one determined attacker to undermine an enormous
crowdsourced effort.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
No I hadn't seen that but it sounds unfortunate =/

------
sgallant
Sad you're not using Hugo to power the engine room blog :(

------
arvinsim
Mandatory postal code makes me sad.

------
pcurve
yikes... I make too little. :-/ I graduated from an ivy almost 15 years ago...

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
I don't understand why this matters. I can see why someone graduating just now
from an Ivy should demand a better salary, but 15 years ago ... ? Not
criticizing, I'm just curious as a foreigner. The US university system kind of
remind you of the Indian caste system.

------
ilostmykeys
let salary = "$" \+ Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER

------
transman
As a transgender person, I won't fill it out unless I have the option to opt
out of gender identification or select "other" for gender. I'm not alone.

[http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx](http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx)

[http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sd/news_article/1...](http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sd/news_article/109566/_PARENT/layout_details_cc/true)

[http://www.autostraddle.com/facebook-wants-you-to-do-you-
add...](http://www.autostraddle.com/facebook-wants-you-to-do-you-adds-new-non-
binary-pronoun-and-gender-identity-options-223746/)

~~~
coldtea
There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet.

Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this
very specific endeavor?

Heck, I'm a male, but often put female in forms, just to not give marketeers
my info...

~~~
DanBC
It's a useful criticism.

In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to
have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about
gender reassignment.

Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other",
they should be able to tick "female".

~~~
lowboy
> identifies as female

As a point of clarification, this should be "identifies as a woman". Sex
(male/female) is a physical characteristic, gender (man/woman) is a social
construct.

More info from transman's first link:

> Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male
> or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as
> chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender
> refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and
> attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or
> girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and
> feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across
> different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.

~~~
DanBC
EDIT: The text you quote does not say that man / woman and male / female have
different uses. There's nothing to say that male / female only refer to sex
not gender.

If what you said is true (and it isn't) people would only need two questions
on forms:

"Are you male or female?"

"Are you a man or a woman?"

This would make no sense and so we can safely ignore it.

~~~
lowboy
Yes, people do still conflate sex and gender terms. But language is
increasingly shifting toward using male/female to describe sex and man/woman
to describe gender because it results in greater clarity.

Sex and gender are separate concepts, and having separate terms for each is a
net positive for the English language IMO.

------
Tharkun
Very US centric. No currency field? Not everyone expresses wages in
amount/year. Are these amounts before tax? After tax?

~~~
walshemj
I think most professional Salaried jobs quote salary per year.

~~~
yitchelle
Not so true in Europe. There are quite a significant number of countries where
it is normal to specify a monthly wage rather than a yearly salary. Germany
being one of them.

~~~
walshemj
well a this is an English language forum and b quoteing a single year makes it
easier to account for countries that have extra month payments

~~~
yitchelle
> a this is an English language forum

Are you saying that HN is only relevant to English speaking folks?

------
LorenzoLlamas
As well noted, Glassdoor and other places already do this. Why do software
developers feel compelled to constantly "invent" things we already have plenty
of. Do something unique, original, or amazing. Stop copying everyone and just
putting new UIs and a few extra database fields on stuff and calling it
'innovation'. So tired of the internet and all the noise clogging it up. Once
the crash happens, we will have a glut of 'developers' who will claim they are
disenfranchised and out of work and blame the economy... just like the steel-
mill workers of the 70s/80s. We don't need this now, and we won't need it
later when your main employer stops paying you because you don't actually
BUILD anything interesting.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> Why do software developers feel compelled to constantly "invent" things we
> already have plenty of. Do something unique, original, or amazing.

You're completely right.

I'm glad no one redid MySpace / friendster better. We have plenty of social
sites!

I'm glad no one redid altavista / Yahoo search. We have too many!!!

I'm glad no one tried to make yet another email client after AOL / compuserve.

I'm glad no one else got into the space industry after Boeing / BST / ATCO /
Lockheed; what a waste of time!

I'm glad no one made another laptop after the Epson / HP. So stupid!

I'm glad no one tried their hand at making a tablet; Microsoft essentially
invented the category! No one could have done better! No one!

I'm glad no one reinvented the smart phone / pda. Who needs anything but
Windows Mobile 6 / Palm / Newton?

(I could go on for longer than the text field on HN can hold)

> Once the crash happens, we will have a glut of 'developers' who will claim
> they are disenfranchised and out of work

This will never happen even if there was a "crash". You forget that literally
___every single industry_ __is moving to be more and more technologically
controlled, automated, savy, etc; you really think that if there is a "crash"
that software developers are going to just sit there out of work? It wouldn't
last long...

~~~
LorenzoLlamas
Well... personally I have to discount your examples of hardware "innovation"
since I was talking about software.

But on that note, my iPhone isn't _that_ much better than a Palm Pilot. Let's
see... notes, calendar, emails... it's all there. I even had map and nav on my
Pilot back then. Granted, Apple Maps, Waze, and Google Maps are better and
faster UI, but the basic functionality was there. We just keep improving speed
and UI in the hardware world. Stuff like touch screens that actually work are
nice - I once owned a touch screen way back in the 1980s (dating myself). Not
very useful compared to an iPad.

However, is Google Search that much better than AltaVista? No.

Is Facebook better than MySpace for keeping in touch with friends? Not at all.
Facebook is better at monetizing you, and the UI is a bit nicer, but come on,
if you want to collate your friends into a web-based "friend's list" and post
on a wall/board/timeline, it's all the same. Next FB replacement will be no
better.

Email? Surely you are kidding there. There isn't a modern email client worth a
penny. Web-based AOL email and Gmail are nearly identical. Some extra filters
in Gmail and better UI and JS, but it's the SAME. You send email from point A
to point B and people read it. Hey, even attach an image! It worked then, it
works now. Same exact underlying technology.

And if anyone had to PAY for Gmail to migrate from AOL, they NEVER would have.
So free/freemium has become the expected demands of consumers now (and they
are in for a shock).

So, oddly, you have kind of proven my point. All developers are doing is
reinventing the wheel. They have no new ideas (mostly). It's only 'hey, how
can we take existing product A and make it faster, cooler, shinier?'.

However, try to rethink the whole concept of email - and there is a dozen
graveyards filled with a thousand tombstones of developer projects that swore
we would 'finally' eliminate email or email overload. No one has done it. Not
even the mighty 'give us your personal info' Gmail. I wouldn't even be
surprised to see Google shutdown (or charge for) Gmail one day. They did it
with Reader and no one saw that coming either.

So, go ahead and keep using your free services that aren't making any money
and expecting it all to stay the same.

I'm not questioning that developers will be unemployed in general - of course
real industries (like car manufacturing, textiles, POS, etc) need good
developers to build and maintain systems. But the web-based side projects
(such as the one on this original post) who clog up HN with "Show HN" posts
about another database online with a few extra fields and some snazzy UI (or
Bootstrap 3!!) are DOA and they don't seem to get it.

