

The Hacker Survey - tialys
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEhmQ0JYLXE2M2ZJU05jZU0xWHFBS0E6MA..

======
nico
You should add country of residence, otherwise you might get distorted data.
Income varies greatly from country to country.

For example you might have someone with a lot of experience and education but
low income in India, and then have someone with not as much education or
experience but a lot higher income in the US.

~~~
algorias
Seconded. The income I put in will compare ridiculously low to US wages, even
if it's quite respectable around here (Chile)

~~~
nico
I guess we Chileans think alike :P

~~~
algorias
Cool! I thought I was just throwing a random datum out there. I'm not chilean
actually, but I've lived here for most of my life.

~~~
nico
Drop me a line sometime, my contact info is in my profile.

------
10ren
Request: make the summary viewable now

More Actions > Edit Confirmation > Let everyone see response summary

Google's summary looks like this:
[http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dDBXako...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dDBXako0djZqbTZXVzRaY0lHVHhSOGc6MA.).

The form for that sample is here:
[http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDBXako0djZq...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDBXako0djZqbTZXVzRaY0lHVHhSOGc6MA..))

And here's the response page:
[http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dDBXako0...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dDBXako0djZqbTZXVzRaY0lHVHhSOGc6MA.).

~~~
tialys
I was not aware you could do that! Here's the link!

[http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0J...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0JYLXE2M2ZJU05jZU0xWHFBS0E6MA.).

~~~
nico
Wow, are there actually females reading HN?

~~~
concretecode
OK. You've gotten that out of your system.

Now go read this: <http://xkcd.com/322/> and go back to Reddit.

------
Derrek
I hope you share the results of this survey. I'd be very interested in knowing
how it all shakes out.

~~~
jacquesm
he says he will on <http://davelyon.net/mldata.html>

~~~
astine
Do we have an ETA on this link?

~~~
tialys
I was planning to wait until the link drops off the front page since people
are still taking the survey. I think I'll take the other posters advice
however, and let everyone see the summary now.

------
sophacles
Please add an academia option for employment. I work at a state school so I
put government, but that feels wrong.

~~~
tialys
I feel it's too late to add an option like that, but I do regret not putting
it in. I tried to be as broad as possible, but academia makes sense.

Thanks!

~~~
MaysonL
Should also have had retired as an option - I vacillated btw self- and un-
employed.

------
omouse
This isn't the greatest survey in the world :/

~~~
tialys
I worked on it for a few hours to get it down to some simple things that might
co-relate to a persons income -- I only needed simple data to test on. I think
it will still be interesting to analyze nonetheless. Perhaps in a few months
we could put together a slightly better survey? My email is in my profile if
you have suggestions, but with over 300 responses so far (WOW!) it'd be hard
to change this current survey.

I appreciate your feedback!

~~~
whatusername
For the next survey:

country.

and maybe a basic description of what you do (coder, founder, other tech role,
etc)

------
DanielStraight
Also, I don't know how many "childred" I have or how I can format a number
like "1,000,000" without using symbols. ;)

~~~
tialys
I've fired my copy editor and fixed the mistakes ;)

Thanks!

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
23 minutes later and it still reads "childred".

Mind you, I do dread a child, so maybe it's right ...

~~~
DanielStraight
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been
sacked.

~~~
PebblesRox
Møøse!

(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvIKL_pTZFE>)

------
TallGuyShort
You may want to specify the currency you're going to use for the income
question. US dollars, I assume?

~~~
tialys
Thanks, I'll add that real quick. Thanks for taking it as well!

------
parbo
You should have included country as a field since income varies a lot between
countries.

------
spydez
What's the difference between a corporation ("the term denotes a body
corporate formed to conduct _business_ " - Wikipedia) and a (large or small)
business?

~~~
tialys
I guess I was trying to imply a huge business with suits and cube farms and
offices around the world... think an international bank or similar.

~~~
bajsejohannes
I would ask directly, then. For example "How many people work in your
company?" or "In how many countries does your employer have offices?"

~~~
derefr
I would answer "who knows" to both of those things ('s not like i'm in HR) but
I'd still be able to get a sense of whether I was working at a business or a
corporation from the culture.

~~~
tialys
Thats a good description, thats what I was really going for.

------
nebula
The data being collected is purely demographic. And I don't think that the
data set would be very big either. Around a thousand entries even if most of
the HNers take interest?

I am not able to imagine anything significant that can be done by using this
data as training set in a machine learning algorithm. Is it possible for you
to elaborate a little bit on what you intend to train your algorithms to
achieve?

~~~
tialys
<http://cs.nmu.edu/~mkowalcz/cs495/project1.html>

This is the actual assignment. The data set doesn't need to be huge, it's more
about the ideas than refining the algorithms (so we can cover more ground).
The more entries the better, and so far (in one hour) I've gotten 400. I
suspect this may work out for (some) interesting data.

------
mish
It's a shame you didn't take the opportunity to gather ZIP codes. That would
allow for some adjustment of your salary figures based on avg income modifiers
for an area (hell, you could use the GS modifiers the Govt. uses even for
ease-of-use).

But this is a great idea, I commend you on the experiment!

------
mitko
I think to perform the learning you need to have some property of a hacker
that you will learn. Maybe you need also some non-hackers to fill your survey
so that you can perform classification.

Directly: How do you plan to use ML on this dataset? What will you learn?

------
jlees
Running a startup = small business rather than self employed, I guess, but
possibly disproportionately high working hours and low income for the actual
founders...

------
Raphael
How would I go about styling a Google spreadsheet?

~~~
10ren
I had a play with the google survey (a nice viral touch of having a "Create
your own form" link - simple and unobtrusive, but notable because there's so
little other text).

It's a very nice little app, you can view the responses right from the
creation page (either with cute little pie-charts, or as a spreadsheet).

But I agree there's a shameful bug in it for styling: when I click "Theme:
Plain", I get a "Not Found Error 404"

EDIT Here's google's help on it, but as I said, it's not working for me
(though clearly it worked for the submitter's survey):
[http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=145737&#...</a>

------
araneae
As of 9:55 EST, (# pre-highschoolers == # women == meaning of life), returns
true.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
How do I account for running two businesses in two different industries?

~~~
dasil003
which one do you most identify with?

~~~
reconbot
I've got about 2 businesses and outside and within them probably 4 "jobs". I
always put the one that I put the most hours in.

