

Show HN: Crowdsourced salary prediction - cagriaksay
http://salaryfairy.com

======
WoodenChair
You need to offer a way for me to turn off my account. I logged in just to try
it, found out it's not what I thought it was and am not that interested, and
now want my account deleted and your access to my LinkedIn revoked.

Showing some peoples' profiles anonymously is not very anonymous at all. If
you're the owner of a one man company then not showing your name is
meaningless. You need to anonymize the actual companies too.

Don't get me wrong the site looks nice and you have done good work. But I want
out, and you should offer a way out on day one.

~~~
cagriaksay
We will offer self account deletion shortly. Meanwhile, you can send us an
email to request removal.

We will also introduce new ways to anonomize your company and education info.
Thank you very much for your feedback.

------
bct
It would be nice to see a sample so that I know what I'm getting into before I
give you access to my LinkedIn.

~~~
antonius
Same thing I was thinking. Not too keen on providing all of my information
without some sort of example(s).

~~~
elmyraduff
Thank you both! You are definitely right, it is now the first thing on our
list.

------
geocar
It's a bit difficult to tell what the experience will be before you jump in,
and it's not very fun when you do. Screenshots of the experience would help a
lot.

Also: After seeing it, it's not going to work very well for HMF-level people
since most people don't know what an HMF _looks like_.

It might be better to randomly swap extracted features them around with other
people so that you can tell how you're measuring each feature. You might find
some features deserve drastically higher weights to correct for people's
subjective "feelings" about how much someone should make.

I like that it tells me how other people guess (after I submit my own guess),
but it only tells me the mean (and it says average). When it had collected
guesses for my salary, I watched for a few guesses to pile in and it seems to
be taking the mean of them. I don't think this is a good idea, for example
someone guessing _very_ low repeatedly will drag down everyone's score.

It might be useful to collect "what do I think this person makes" separately
from "what do I think this person could be making".

~~~
ritchiea
What's an HMF?

~~~
geocar
Head Mother Fucker.

------
liopleurodon
How does SalaryFairy know what's correct? Just in general?

Someone with a statistics background might have a better idea, but I'm
thinking might help to allow users to, in their profile (and have it be
optional), enter their salary.

That way, you'll not only be able to show people what other people think they
should be making, but you might be able to (once a certain threshold is met)
show what people with similar experiences in a certain region _are_ making.
And you'd be able to see how close the guesses are to the real thing and maybe
figure out a margin of error.

It might also be nice to allow people to put in descriptions of what they did
at their workplaces. Someone doing embedded development might get a
significantly higher salary than someone doing .NET, even if they have a
similar # of years of experience.

------
cannam
Interesting, but I found it incredibly hard to come up with sensible estimates
for profiles.

So much depends on their location -- do I assume they'll be staying where they
are and try to estimate what salaries there should be like, or estimate based
on my own location? -- and the sort of places they might like to work. If
you're currently in a university or a small business you might be paid less
than at a bank for the same work, but you might be choosing to work there for
other reasons, so it's not that useful to point out that another employer
would pay more.

I found my estimates were generally much lower than the averages from other
users, perhaps because I currently work in a university myself.

Edit: and indeed, it turns out that the estimates I'm seeing for my own
profile are about double my actual pay. Which isn't surprising, because that's
about what I might expect in the private sector in the same location.

------
eranation
So far the prediction average of 2 people is less than half of what I
currently make (and less than half for the average salary for my role in that
city)

You need a LOT of people to make this work... so far it seems like a nice idea
but not sure it can work relying only 100% on "crowd-smarts"

~~~
arsey
My prediction average of 3 people is more than twice what I currently make.

The estimate I made for someone was 70kish before I went on to see my similar
one. I wonder if that's just the safe number lots of guessers are settling on?

~~~
ritchiea
There's a major bias to guessing in the 70-90k range. People likely to earn
far less or far more than that are being pushed toward the middle.

------
jayhuang
This is pretty cool, but I do have one question:

How do you account for the fact that many of your users may not be familiar
with the salary ranges in a specific area?

I understand the goal is to get a large amount of estimates for each user, to
compensate for that, but my guess is that locations where larger amounts of
users are located would have far better estimates. I just saw a couple of
Vancouver (where I live) people, in positions I have trained and hired people
in, but the estimated salary seems to be quite off considering that Vancouver
salaries are noticeably lower than San Fran in reality.

Edit: It seems most of the profiles for me are Vancouver/Toronto/Ottawa, so
I'm guessing that's their way of getting locals to estimate salaries.

~~~
cagriaksay
Thanks for your feedback. You are indeed seeing profiles only from Canada. You
can change your settings to predict salaries from other countries. We will
introduce filtering based on specific area in the future.

------
4lun
It'd be cool if you also showed the currency converted for where the person is
located, maybe in brackets next to the dollar amount. I'm in the UK and I'm
getting asked to predict in dollars the salary for someone else who is also in
the UK.

~~~
cagriaksay
Converted local currencies are now displayed besides $ amount. Thanks again
for the feedback.

------
sk24iam
I like the concept. Interesting how it's a game and provides salary analytics
at the same time. I just added my profile but I will check again after a few
people have predicted my salary to see the results.

I was bouncing around a few ideas that involved using the Linkedin API a few
months ago. I have a few questions about Salary Fairy that may help me with my
research...

Does Salary Fairy download a user's profile to the database? If so, I thought
Linkedin required the user to grant permission to store the data in addition
to just obtaining access when logging in. Is this still the case?

What technology stack are you using?

What type of hosting?

~~~
cagriaksay
Thanks! We added a privacy clause stating that we store LinkenIn data. We are
using python/django on a linux server from DigitalOcean.

~~~
sk24iam
Thanks for the response.

I logged in today to find 3 predictions that were double my actual salary.
Maybe if you include an option to add your real salary, the salary predictor
bar only allows guesses within a specific range outside of the real salary. It
might keep the predictions more realistic.

Also, I received an email confirmation from SalaryFairy. What is the purpose
of this if I already logged in with Linkedin? Wouldn't my account already be
verified if I have a Linkedin account?

------
cagriaksay
Our site provides personalized salary predictions with wisdom of the crowds.
We recently built a scoring feature where you get higher scores for good
salary predictions. We would like to get your feedback.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Just connected my LinkedIn profile; how are you predicting salaries? Sharing
my public profile with others and aggregating their salary estimates based on
weighted criteria? I assume those with the closest estimates to actual salary
have their estimates rated higher than others (based on your leaderboard here:
[http://salaryfairy.com/fairy/score](http://salaryfairy.com/fairy/score))

~~~
cagriaksay
Yes. We display anonymous profiles to our users and aggregate their
predictions. Predictions based on weighted criteria is coming soon.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Excellent work. Something to consider would be to constrain salary estimates
to the same industry based on LinkedIn profile endorsements my profile
contains.

For example, I'm an IT professional. When I clicked "Predict salaries", a
profile for someone in the financial industry was displayed. I have no idea
what they should be making.

~~~
cagriaksay
Thanks :) Scoring is one of the criteria we are looking into. We need to be
careful not to bias predictions too much towards high scoring predictors. We
are now filtering profiles by country. Once we get to a healthy user base, we
will introduce more filtering options.

~~~
toomuchtodo
No problem! I've thought many times how to solve this problem, but all of the
data is opaque :( Wish you guys well!

------
ritchiea
Salary is a weird number. For instance giving a startup founder who is an ex-
Google engineer a prediction is awkward because she could maybe fetch a mid
six figure salary if she wanted but she is probably is paying herself enough
to get by or even nothing depending on the stage of a startup.

It's unclear whether I should be answering what salary does this person's
skills merit? Or what salary do I think they are earning today?

I also wish I could refresh and/or edit my profile on salaryfairy.

------
Jamie452
It would be cool if you got recruiters on board, so they can see the crowd
estimated salary of an employee - so they can see what people who actually
know about technology think someone is worth.

I don't really like recruiters, in my experience they tell you you're aiming
too high, but don't know anything about the technologies.

So my feedback is to try and aim to get recruiters and employers to use this
to find new candidates.

~~~
cagriaksay
Agreed! This is actually one of our goals: to create an opt-in program for our
members to meet serious recruiters based on their salary prediction. We hope
to give our members a fair starting point when talking to a recruiter. Thank
you very much for the feedback.

------
kruk
It would be really interesting if profiles were not filtered by country but
predictions were grouped by it. If I wanted to move abroad I could base my
salary expectations on it.

This would also give more value to people from outside of the U.S. (there is
only one other person from Singapore registered, so as it is I won't get many
predictions).

~~~
cagriaksay
Thank you for your feedback. We will work on features for members who are
curious about other locations.

------
pdq
How is this different than Glassdoor.com?

~~~
elmyraduff
Glassdoor gives salary ranges based on title, company, etc. Our aim is to
provide personalized salary predictions based on your education, experience
and skillset.

------
quarterwave
Apart from salary, is any indication provided of the volume of matching
jobs/locations?

~~~
cagriaksay
This is in our future plans.

------
patorjk
It might be useful to show your estimated average salary, and your estimated
average salary from people in your area. Most people probably don't have a
good idea of what the going rates are outside of their geographic location.

------
j-mac
They should offer A/B testing on your profile to maximize you estimated
salary.

------
kosei
I think the best way for this to work is for you to pair it with a more
professional algorithm (e.g. Payscale, Salary.com). I am not sure I would ever
trust what a bunch of random unqualified people say my salary should be.

------
Demeno
Some quick UI ideas
[http://i.imgur.com/7PDTIt9.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7PDTIt9.jpg)

Maybe also keep the scroller for when you absolutely have to have a higher
resolution...

~~~
elmyraduff
thank you very much! it is definitely a great idea to show time spent at a job
more clearly. also we will work on the scroller as you suggested.

------
guess_my_salary
Why don't you take a guess at mine?
[http://salaryfairy.com/fairy/guess/420](http://salaryfairy.com/fairy/guess/420)

------
Bahamut
This is a very interesting idea - so far with 7 predictions, the predicted #
is more than $30k than what I currently make.

Goes to show how underpaid people can be.

------
gjm11
I find it extraordinary how many people are willing to give full access to
their LinkedIn account and get so little in exchange.

------
brickmort
right off the bat, I'm not so comfortable about giving the site access to my
LinkedIn account. No promise that it wont spam my account somehow or post
things to my Linkedin feed.

~~~
cagriaksay
We don't request the necessary permission from LinkedIn to send a message on
behalf of you. We have no intention to spam, but we will put that promise
explicitly on the homepage. Thanks for the feedback.

