
LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn - sk24iam
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/02/linkedin-plots-a-place-on-the-economic-graph-launches-salary-to-chart-what-we-earn/
======
KiwiCoder
I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a
downward trend.

Of course I'm speaking only from personal experience, but as both candidate
and hiring manager LinkedIn holds next to no value for me. I see it as a
commons that has been largely ruined by recruiting agents who are incentivised
by their employers to maximise candidate throughput at everyone else's
expense.

There is some residual value in LinkedIn groups, where peers can network for
mutual benefit, but these pools of genuine interaction inevitably attract
recruiting agents - if indeed they aren't already present as groups admins,
happily lurking while candidates posture and parade.

But I'm not about to close my account (if that is even possible). I'm very
fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and
Bubbles.

~~~
jklinger410
>I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a
downward trend.

I think almost the exact opposite. Linkedin is still missing many features
that could turn it into a bit of a game changer for business.

Maybe as a recruiting tool it's currently trash. I can get behind that. But if
Microsoft manages to bring in a fresh set of users with some new features it
could expand into something actually useful instead of a marketing hellhole.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
Not to say it won't happen, but which fresh set of users would Microsoft
bring? Who do you know that isn't on LinkedIn (registered, if not actively
using)? And of those people, what features do you think would make them want
to start using LinkedIn?

~~~
jklinger410
1\. Mash Linkedin and Skype and create a Slack/Facebook For Business
Competitor.

2\. Integrate that with Office 360 for Business.

3\. Create a much more appealing Resume/CV that either integrates well with
hiring tools or competes directly with them (monster, indeed, so-on) by
creating your own backend for recruiting.

4\. Make it very simple to migrate your MS Live/Outlook/Skype profile to a
Linkedin profile (or do it automatically ala Google+).

This makes advertisers happy. This makes any corp using Office 360 immediately
integrate to Linkedin. This makes Linkedin much more appealing to candidates
and recruiters. This could bring people over from competitor services. This
actually makes the entire MS Office suite more appealing.

~~~
kohanz
Isn't (3) what they've been trying to accomplish for years? I believe what you
see now in LinkedIn is their best effort at tackling that problem (and I'm not
impressed).

~~~
jklinger410
Yeah, it is. I guess it's a bit of an assumption of mine that MS would be able
to do a better job of it than Linkedin.

------
allengeorge
Hopefully LinkedIn won't ask me for my salary in the future. Cause I
definitely don't trust them with my salary info. They'll sell it to everyone -
recruiters, other companies...

~~~
twokul
I'd suggest you to read
[https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-
salar...](https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salary-
transparency-to-the-world), the section about privacy.

~~~
mavelikara
Here is what the _current_ content says:

    
    
      One of the interesting dichotomies with compensation data 
      is that many users want this information, but don’t want to 
      have their individual data exposed or connected back to them.  
      Salary information is personal to each of our members. With 
      this in mind, and consistent with our Members First organizational 
      philosophy, one of the first goals we established when we set out 
      to embark on this project was to provide powerful salary insights 
      in aggregate without risking an individual’s private information. 
      In the end, we built a salary collection system to provide the 
      strongest protections for the anonymity of all of our members—no 
      easy task. Parts of our approach are detailed later in this article.
    
      Because we proactively separate a member’s submission data from their 
      Member ID when compensation data is submitted, it enables us to 
      secure the system in such a way that we cannot even support the 
      ability for a member to update their previously submitted salary 
      information - they have to resubmit. Furthermore, our system provides 
      protection not just from hackers out in the wild, but also provides 
      access control against unauthorized use by internal users.
      

If I am reading this correctly, what they seem to say is that as implemented
currently, they don't have the ability to track a person's salary information
to their profile and hence won't be able to sell that information.

~~~
sgw928
Then when someone resubmits new data, how do they know that a previously
submitted data point is now stale and shouldn't be used any more?

~~~
mahyarm
What I think happens:

1\. You submit a salary info struct, which includes time of submission. The
struct does not contain a userId.

2\. Your account's lastUpdatedSalaryDate gets updated, with only
day/week/month level precision.

Someone with access to the entire database may be able to connect the two if
the salary set for your job is small enough.

Then they weigh salary information based on how fresh the entry is. Stale
entries don't get a good weight, and you updating your salary is just another
info point, and it might go into another bucket if you got a title change (ex
software eng -> sr. software eng.). If you got promoted, then the old salary
info is probably still relevant for people in lower level positions.

------
FLUX-YOU
This is never going to be accurate. Titles alone are a poor indicator of
ability in software.

E.g. I hold the title of "Senior Software Engineer" despite only have 2
years/4 mo. of experience and very little of that experience is project
management or non-code things.

When talking to recruiters in my area for a new position and giving a base
salary of $90k, they routinely come back with "You won't get that offer with
your level of experience".

In practice, I routinely cut the Senior from my title to avoid expectations I
can't meet.

Dice.com has a much better idea behind this, which is tying skills and years
of skill to estimated salary. The backend for LinkedIn's site honestly does
not look more complex than a few straight-forward SQL queries.

~~~
twokul
you are making a lot of assumptions, read up on accuracy here
[https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-
salar...](https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salary-
transparency-to-the-world)

~~~
FLUX-YOU
There's no details in there about valuation of skills and how that plays into
the results.

For other industries where titles are a little more controlled, it may be a
fine measuring stick, but people hire in software based on what skills you
have and what you've done. Not by title.

------
wdewind
Self reported salaries are just never going to be a good data source. I was
hoping since this was LinkedIn and they have tons of resources they'd be doing
something different, but they don't seem to have made any progress on the many
attempts people make each year to do salary analysis in this way. Anyone have
any good ideas for actually gathering accurate salary data?

~~~
hamandcheese
What incentive do people have to lie about their salary (assuming it's
anonymous)?

~~~
patcheudor
There are massive incentives to lie about how much you make. It's not hard to
imagine this tool will be used by HR compensation experts to determine wage
parity. With that in mind, the higher the average, the better positioned you
will be to negotiate a higher salary, therefore everyone who reports how much
they make is ultimately incentivized to state more than they make in hopes of
driving up the wage index for their field.

~~~
chrisdbaldwin
And who is to stop a software company from doing the opposite? If they want
lower wages, they could spam a region with fake workers with lower wages.

~~~
patcheudor
Thus to the original point: self reported data is questionable.

~~~
mfoy_
It would be neat if the IRS / CRA / national tax body would publish summaries
based on people's actual tax returns. Although you don't specify things like
industry, and other career specific quirks on your tax returns. (i.e. Ruby on
Rails developer vs Dynamics CRM developer)

------
mswen
Awhile back I reserved the domain developersalarybenchmarks.com

HR departments can purchase salary benchmarks from companies like Mercer.
Everyone on the developers side would like better benchmarks that are free or
nearly free to even the odds when negotiating job offers or raises from
current employers.

I haven't created a site yet in part because of the self-reporting problems.
Will developers trust an unknown start-up with their real salary data plus the
education, skills, experience and location data needed to make this targeted
and really valuable? Can we have a process that is sufficiently rigorous and
accurate that HR departments would acknowledge it in negotiations? How can we
prevent developers from inflating their current salaries and other
compensation? How can we prevent companies from coming on the site and using
bogus accounts to drive down salaries?

As someone else mentioned the guys at step.com - seem to have an interesting
idea of having developers post the background and skills and then have people
anonymously value that background. I suspect that this approach will also face
issues of acceptance in negotiations.

~~~
ones_and_zeros
I've thought about this as well. Ultimately you need access to some pretty
private data. One thought I've had is to use the mint/intuit APIs to get a
list of a persons transactions in their bank account and find the ones that
occur every 2 weeks, etc.

Or possibly have users upload paystubs, though you'd have to have someway to
verify. I'm sure that's possible.

~~~
notyourwork
Its an interesting approach but I see trouble convincing a user to give their
mint credentials to a site for salary information. Imagine if Glassdoor or
LinkedIn asked for this.

~~~
ones_and_zeros
You wouldn't need to give your mint credentials. They have an API so that you
can create an app that gets read only access based on an OAuth token for a
particular user. Similar to fb oauth, google, etc.

------
electriclove
I played around a bit and didn't find it too useful. The folks at step.com
(previously posted on HN) produce something that is much more useful for me:
[https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-
linke...](https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-linkedin/)

~~~
AIMunchkin
As someone who has worked at several of the listed companies in that plot,
that's significantly more accurate (IMO of course) than either Glassdoor or
the Salary data.

------
koolba
So when will LinkedIn release a plugin that hacks into your HR system to fetch
(and upload to them) the salaries of you and all your peers?

~~~
SEJeff
I love that you're assuming they haven't already released it :)

~~~
koolba
> I love that you're assuming they haven't already released it :)

Ha! I didn't even think about that!

Plus with Microsoft owning them, it's directly integrated as a core feature of
Exchange Server. Probably rolled out in the most recent "security update"
patch.

------
kurtpre
Not really convincing (yet). Mainly US & UK cities, and the data is based on
small user numbers so far. Would say you get so far a better overview on
[https://teleport.org](https://teleport.org) or www.glassdoor.com...

------
cookiecaper
Surprised no one has yet mentioned that this is probably an attempt to neuter
Glassdoor. LinkedIn makes money by monopolizing recruiter time, taking money
for job posts, etc. Glassdoor is a threat to that, and the single unique
benefit Glassdoor offers is a salary estimate.

I don't really see this as a fundamental shift in anything, just an attempt to
tack on a competitor's featureset.

~~~
bbcbasic
Yey! I can now go to Linkedin for the mean average of some pseudo-random
numbers, _cough_ sorry I meant salary information.

------
sherifmansour
While this is sort of cool for some people, I think the sad thing about a tool
like this is that it's only going to encourage the wrong behaviors for a lot
of people. It puts more focus on people's job titles than what they actually
do. It encourages people to chase the corporate ladder, not find meaningful
jobs... I'm sure it adds a lot of value to some, but some small part of me
can't help but think there are thousands of people searching for their job
titles today and running up to their manager asking for the next title...

~~~
AsyncAwait
> It encourages people to chase the corporate ladder, not find meaningful
> jobs.

From my (arguably limited) experience, if you want a truly meaningful job,
nothing beats your own business as in a corporation you'll always be subject
to office politics, wishes and desires of your superiors, corporate deciding
to change course etc., that's at least what I am planning to do in order for
my work to be truly "meaningful".

The trouble is, you'll usually have to take a pay cut for the first couple of
years and it's a greater risk than most people are willing to take.

~~~
dozzie
It's not a binary choice, corporation or own business. There are others' small
businesses, too.

------
markwaldron
Are they going to access our email without our permission to get this
information too?

~~~
notyourwork
I wonder if Google has not already parsed this information out of job offers
sent to Gmail users.

------
deadmik3
It seems like the areas are really limited. Best I could find for my central
Mass location was "Greater Boston Area" which really skews the numbers up
(obviously cost of living in Boston is higher)

~~~
drusepth
Yep, I may not be the target demographic (working remotely as software
developer, hiring remote software developers for personal projects) but it
kind of sucks for remote-first companies (i.e. fully-remote) also, as it
requires a location to make comparisons to.

The map at the bottom of the landing page would be cool to have as a proper
tool (seeing salary-per-title comparisons across the map), but I can't seem to
find it anywhere for actual use.

------
k2xl
I built a (free) chrome extension that will estimate salaries of LinkedIn
profiles you view (along with other data)
[https://recap.work](https://recap.work)

It's not perfect, but it is helpful when trying to get an idea of what someone
is making. The upgraded version has salary conversion support for different
currencies for other countries.

------
pmiller2
This seems like a game everybody is wanting to get in on these days. That
alone is making me wonder: why? and why now?

~~~
notyourwork
I think it has something to do with supply and demand of engineers both
continuing to grow. The market is increasing and any growing market gives
people a reason to justify trying to get in on the action.

------
usaphp
I still don't understand what people are using LinkedIn for.

~~~
adamredwoods
Networking. It's a rolodex.

------
tonywe64
Try out this Chrome extension that works as a LinkedIn recruiting assistant,
it provides salary range estimates based on company, job title, and region. As
well as the likelihood of changing job along with many other data points.

[https://candidate.ai](https://candidate.ai)

------
vonklaus
This is data a lot of people have wanted for a lot of good reasons. While this
could flatten the labor market and even out a corps advantage from
asymmetrical info dist-- I would've rather anyone but linkedin be successful
here. Other than extremely tiny sample sets, no one has actually succeeded in
this space/featureset. I can barely see peoples profiles without getting
signups shoved down my throat.

Fuck linkedin. It is a closed service which disproportionately provides value
in a way that makes it nearly useless, while simultaneosly selling data to
recruiters and companies. So this wont help anyone as much as linkedin and I
am skeptical this data will be open.

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Fifer82
Completely unproven, but all I see this doing, is driving down wages. No one
will say "I think we are not paying enough, looking at this average". It will
be "We are paying far too much, lets bring ourselves inline".

~~~
refurb
I'd have to disagree. Large companies spend a lot of money on their approach
to compensation. They hire outside consultants to benchmark their pay relative
to competitors. I've worked at jobs where pay has gone up due to such
engagements. Having this data on LinkedIn isn't going to change that process.

~~~
Fifer82
Most people don't work at large companies though.

------
loeg
> Lest you think you can get away with putting in a random number if you want
> to visit the Salary pages but don’t want to give up your information (or pay
> up for Premium membership), think again. Shapero said that there are machine
> learning tools in place to detect when you’ve put in an “off” figure.

This seems pretty flawed. You can still put in a random number in some band,
skewing the data (probably) upwards.

------
xapata
> "Data Scientist" \-- Title not found. Please select a valid title.

I thought Patil invented that term for LinkedIn (along with Hammerbacher at
Facebook).

------
romanovcode
And as always, doesn't work in Europe.

~~~
kraftman
Works in england.

~~~
Naritai
Which, based on what I've seen in the news, is pretty insistent these days
that it's not Europe ;)

~~~
kraftman
It's in until it's out, and it's not out yet.

------
yalogin
Its amusing to me that linkedin recruiters are the ones consistently sending
me requests for completely unrelated jobs. The rest of the crowd seem to be at
least related but linkedin recruiters just don't seem to care. Not sure why.

~~~
johnward
If someone goes through the work to find my email address then it's generally
a related job. LinkedIn makes it too easy to spam.

------
scottmcdot
Can only view Melbourne, Florida Area. No Melbourne, Australia yet.

~~~
brongondwana
Everyone knows that nothing outside the USA really exists

------
pinaceae
well, comparab.ly better step up fast.

------
mikebay
Dear Microsoft, we have a small trust issue between you and my personal
information..

~~~
mywittyname
How come?

------
scottlegrand2
Numbers are way off for the bay area for those with hot skills much like
Zillow's house prices are off for desirable houses in OK neighorhoods. Hard to
see how they'd distinguish between that and malicious outliers.

Or to oversimplify it: never stop learning and you'll never stop earning.

