
Show HN: I built a website for sharing salary info - waterlink
https://www.fellowage.io/?r=hn
======
cletus
Four obvious questions:

1\. How is this different to Glassdoor?

2\. How do you get enough data points to be useful?

3\. How do you account for selection bias?

4., (and here's the big one) how do you account for the mistruths of self-
reported income?

The last one is the big problem with all self-reported income summaries. One
thing I've learned over the year is that people lie, even anonymously. I'm not
even sure why. Do they really believe it? Are they posting it to make
themselves feel good? I really don't know. But I do know that I don't believe
your salary claim until I see a W2.

As for selection bias, this is a big one too. Take a company like Google. At
level 7+ data point get pretty thin. This is partially because there aren't
that many but the real problem is that these people really have no motivation
to share. So you don't really see the big outliers.

Lastly, most of these aren't clear on what number they are report and what
users should report. Is it base salary? What about bonus? What about
RSUs/options?

As anyone who has worked in big tech knows, base salary number are almost
completely useless. Salary band is defined by level (pretty tightly, in my
experience). More than 50% of your total compensation will come from bonus and
stock and stock in particular has massive variance.

~~~
lavezzi
Does question #1 really need to be asked? Glassdoor has lost its impartiality
through solicitation of corporate money and influence, and imo can no longer
be trusted. The scene is ripe for competition now.

~~~
t0mas88
We had a Glassdoor sales guy contact HR after a negative review to sell us a
paid option to "improve" our profile. My trust in them since then is below
zero.

~~~
cletus
Ah the Yelp business model.

~~~
nemosaltat
I, like you, used to flippantly accuse Yelp of extortion. It’s always easy to
believe the worst. Then someone here on HN provided several helpful articles
that gave me pause and helped me update my point of view.

Yelp themselves have addressed this with a dedicated page:
[https://www.yelp.com/extortion](https://www.yelp.com/extortion)

Maybe I’ve been duped. I’d be curious if your comment is based on different
research, or personal experience.

~~~
dmitrygr
I have a few friends who own restaurants. Yelp extortion is real. i've seen it
myself. Yelp denying it is obvious, who'd admit to it?

They do not "manipulate" ratings, sure... They just take a _looong_ time to
"Review" positive reviews, and not too long to "Review" negative reviews you
get. And, of course, only reviews they have "reviewed can be shown and count
towards your average score...

~~~
keymone
All these claims are publicly testable using web archives to build stats about
review approval speed. Did you verify these claims?

~~~
dqv
>All these claims are publicly testable using web archives

I'm confused about how you think this would work.

1\. Yelp doesn't report on its approval speed.

2\. To get an accurate report on this, you would have to have several accounts
posting positive and negative reviews on the same pages. Yelp doesn't allow
this and would ban the accounts.

3\. Yelp explicitly disallows scraping their site (i.e. having a bot archive
the pages). Doing so would be thwarted by their anti-bot measures. It's also
against their TOS.[0]

Do you have web archives that can be used to build these stats?

[0]: [https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Can-I-copy-or-scrape-
da...](https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Can-I-copy-or-scrape-data-from-
the-Yelp-site?l=en_US)

~~~
keymone
For starters, i don’t even have to give you any hints because if you’re
claiming somebody’s doing extortion you better have some good evidence.

1\. You don’t need that to demonstrate statistically significant difference
between paying and non-paying customers

2\. You don’t need to make any accounts, only read existing and incoming data

3\. Yes, you shouldn’t break TOS but you also shouldn’t be throwing around
unsubstantiated accusations of extortion

------
ChrisMarshallNY
As lots of commenters mentioned, this is a nice try, but human (and corporate)
nature dooms it.

The only way to make this kind of thing work, is to legislate salary
transparency.

That may seem to disincentivize individual excellence (by removing the
rewards), but I'd say that it's OK to pay Bob more than Joe, as long as you
are willing to justify that increase in wages. As a manager, I had to fight
like hell to get promotions and increases for my team, so I always had this
information handy.

The other way to incentivize excellence and effort is through bonuses, but
these could easily become opaque, thus, continuing the issue.

In academia, salaries tend to be [relatively] low, so perks become the
currency.

Human nature dictates that we always want to be "better than" our peers (thus
making them "not-peers"). We always seem to find ways to do end-runs around
the system.

I'm fairly glad to be out of the corporate rat-race. I'm doing my own thing,
making less than I ever have, and loving every minute of it.

~~~
waterlink
Legislating salary transparency would be quite awesome actually. And as others
have pointed out, in some countries you can call tax office and ask how much
another person has earned in the last year.

And I do believe that every company needs to get very transparent on how they
decide the salary, when they pay someone differently. There should be a well-
designed set of rules and processes to follow. This way, people who want to
earn more, know exactly what to do and in which direction should they grow and
develop. Also, if they think that this direction doesn’t align with their
personal goals, they can make a better decision about joining another company,
where interests will align better.

~~~
hiram112
> Legislating salary transparency would be quite awesome actually.

I've heard they do this in one or more Scandinavian countries. Essentially,
you can go online and see what your coworkers and neighbors earn.

I have a feeling that's why salaries in these countries, especially when you
include state defined insurance and pension plans, are so normalized. It's
probably also why more innovation tends to take place in the US
(subjectively).

For many of us in the US, I think this would actually be a net negative,
myself included. There is so much division in this country, eventually
employers will simply be forced to dish out nearly identical salaries for
everyone in order to avoid lawsuits and government penalties, even when talent
and performance is radically different between employees.

For example, Employee X has a BS in CS from a great engineering school which
took a lot of effort to obtain. He was hacking away at code on his own as a
teenager and is passionate about tech, and is often working on open source
projects on weekends and evenings.

Another employee comes in - she got a watered-down "Information Systems"
degree from some mediocre pay-to-play online school, and her previous
knowledge of technology is her IPhone and Facebook. She pays her tutition
fees, does the minimum to graduate, and now has her BS, too.

She discovers the talented guy make 50% more than her, even though he's the
guy leading the development projects, ensuring standards are met, cleaning up
the garbage produced by other junior coders, etc. We all know that many teams
form this dynamic, especially in typical contracting and enterprise shops.

Well of course she'll complain. They both have similar 'credentials' on paper,
both work 40 hours, both are in their 30s. Management won't care that one dev
is worth 5x the other, they want to avoid lawsuits and government penalties.
So his salary is lowered, hers is raised. Because he knows he won't get paid
what he's worth anywhere else since it's the same everywhere, he just stop
performing at work, the whole project suffers.

And yes, this has happened in my work place several times in the last few
years as salaries have become more transparent and there are more complaints
from groups who feel that they're being discriminated against, regardless of
their performance and experience.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
You are correct, which is why I think a bonus system would work better.

The problem with bonuses, is that they are very easy to abuse, and many
corporations have incredibly rigid bonus systems that actually make it
difficult to reward individual excellence.

I was just talking with a friend of mine a couple of days ago. He's a Director
at a manufacturing plant, and is awesome.

He spent the last year, working 7 days a week, ten hours a day, to implement
some new processes. The company is being put out to bid for sale, and his
efforts doubled the price.

His efforts alone.

Doubled the price of the company.

He got a tiny raise, and all Directors get the same bonus, based on sales
numbers (which weren't so good). Also, all Directors get the same percentage
of equity.

I suspect that he may be seeing who else could use his talents...

~~~
blackearl
Working that hard for someone else is stupid. Unless you hold the reins, I
wouldn't expect management to suddenly have their hearts grow 10 times larger
at the expense of their own compensation.

~~~
waterlink
I agree with this. No matter how much I love the company, their mission, or
people I work with, it’s not healthy to work 7 days a week and 10h a day for
the company that you are not an owner of. Boundaries between job and life are
flexible, but not as much.

I’d rather spend 10h a day 7 days a week pouring efforts into my own assets,
or towards my vision, and not for someone else’s assets or vision, especially
if I have no say and stake in the high level decisions (like sale of the
company).

------
pc86
So against my better judgment I signed up and shared information. Now that you
have my data, not only is my account is in a "pending" status, but I can't log
in because I get an (obviously incorrect) error that the user doesn't exist.

Pretty godawful experience from the start, since the _only_ reason I added my
information was to see if there was anything relevant since I do not live or
work in a tech hub (quite the opposite).

Edit: And it seems like you need to search for companies in order to see them.
Browsing companies to see if I recognize any in my area would be a good
feature.

~~~
waterlink
The user account does not exist yet for pending registrations. It gets created
only when registration is accepted.

Also, if rejected registration is not updated with correct info in 1 week, it
gets automatically deleted. This data does not become part of the information
that other users can see.

> Browsing companies to see if I recognize any in my area would be a good
> feature.

You are not the first asking for that today. I’ll implement this feature for
the next release.

> the only reason I added my information was to see if there was anything
> relevant

That also screams like a missing feature for me. I could allow people to
browse companies (by location) and show masked data until they sign up and
share their own entry.

~~~
waterlink
1\. I have implemented the company browsing feature

2\. I have made it available without signup/login (partially—you’ll see
companies/locations and how many entries they have each, and be able to
navigate to these company pages, but from there to see numbers, you’d need to
signup/login).

------
outime
How is this different from the database of salaries that other services such
as Glassdoor already offer?

~~~
waterlink
As far as I know, Glassdoor shows only averages and statistical distributions
and doesn’t show separate salary entries. It doesn’t satisfy the questions and
fears that I have set out to solve.

e.g., “Who should I look up to in my company to earn more?” or “How up-to-date
are specific salary entries?”

My product doesn’t answer the first question just yet, but it will in the
future via a peer-to-peer sharing feature that I’m planning in the next
version.

------
mgliwka
Can you enforce a threshold of entries for a certain role after which you
start displaying the salary? And then only display it as a range with
information about the quartiles?

Otherwise it‘s not so anonymous. Sometimes the combination of role and Salary
is enough to point to a single employee. That’s precisely the reason why you
only get statistical information at the other sites.

~~~
waterlink
Yes, this is a pseudo-anonymization. Someone with enough information can
always say: “Oh, I believe this is your salary entry.”

On the other hand, it’s not provable (I don’t save the exact number, and I
separate the account and wage entry securely so that the user and only user
can realize that connection: [https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-
the-privacy-an...](https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-privacy-
and-anonymity-of-my-website-users-5fgb)).

If I apply replace entries with statistical ranges, then the product would
become a clone of other products for this (like Glasdoor, LinkedIn Salary,
etc.). And it won’t solve the problems I set out to solve with it anymore.

------
waterlink
# The problem:

I have always felt certain anxiety when thinking about my salary and only
guessing what my colleagues might be earning. This issue is especially
problematic in cultures and countries in which talking about wage numbers is
an unspoken taboo among the employees.

Quite often, the questions like “Should I ask for a raise?, or am I already
earning maximum that my employer can handle?” “Am I earning too much for the
work that I do?, or am I underpaid?” “Who should I look up to and learn what
they are doing to get a higher salary?” have plagued my mind.

# Existing solutions:

Of course, there are services where you can look at salary levels or
statistical distributions of wages. The problem with them is that they don’t
give you specific (albeit anonymized) numbers of what individuals earn, and
they don’t satisfy nagging feelings of fear and anxiety that I have mentioned
above. Also, it’s hard to tell whether the numbers are up-to-date or not.

# The solution:

I designed this product to be privacy-first so that many more users feel
comfortable sharing their wage information and keeping it up-to-date. It
allows users to see all salary entries in their current company, search for
other companies in preparation for negotiations. Here is the full list of
features:

\- I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles

\- I nudge users to update their info twice a year

\- I keep information quality high

\- You keep your data anonymous

\- You can see your and other companies data

\- You can subscribe for updates for particular job titles/companies

# Plans for the next version:

I plan to allow users to share their non-anonymized information in an
encrypted peer-to-peer fashion with each other if they want to. This answers
the question like, “Oh, somebody earns twice as much as me… And has the same
job title… Who is that?”

Tell me what you think about it! Is there something missing from your
perspective?

~~~
maxaf
> I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles

Lost me right there. Good luck with that. LinkedIn is notoriously a garbage
dump of spam, recruiters and fake profiles. That’s on top of the fact that
most people (myself included) don’t have a LinkedIn profile to begin with in
order to curb spam.

~~~
waterlink
What do you think would be an alternative tool to verify that people enter
real job titles, company names and location?

------
Eikon
Unfortunately, as there is no way to vet submitted information on these kinds
of platforms, their use is pretty limited. Some employer can just go about
submitting false salary data in order to appear more appealing.

This works the other way around too, someone who was not hired, some ex-
employee with some gripe against their previous employer, a misbehaving
competitor... Just about anyone can go about submitting false reviews about
your company in order to damage your employer-brand.

~~~
someexgamedev
I've heard of places where HR requires you to write a (probably) glowing
Glassdoor review during onboarding. Or severance which is conditioned on not
writing a negative review.

Goodhart's Law at work.

~~~
phyzome
Easy enough: Write the glowing review, then contact Glassdoor and report your
company. I'm fairly sure Glassdoor would then remove _all_ the reviews.

~~~
jacquesm
No, they'd offer the company to remove the negative review for a fee.

------
gfs78
If you plan to go global don´t repeat glassdoor mistake (or is it on
purpose?). In countries where inflation rate is big (like 30-50% a year)
salary info that is not tied to the date the worker was perceiving it, its
mostly useless. Same happens with average salary reports, etc.

~~~
waterlink
I’m keeping and showing how old the entry is. Additionally, I plan to notify
users to update their information every half a year, since their last update.
If they don’t update in one year, I plan to hide, or remove their information
automatically.

------
sgehly
>Even a website operator, with direct access to the database, can’t see who is
the owner of your salary entry.

I'm curious about this given you can update/delete your salary entry - does
there not have to be a unique identifier between the account and the entry?

~~~
waterlink
Read more on how I’ve done it here: [https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-
ensured-the-privacy-an...](https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-
privacy-and-anonymity-of-my-website-users-5fgb)

SPOILER: asymmetric encryption with private/public keys.

------
enriquto
I never understood the kind of culture where salaries are secret. How good is
that? In academia you know exactly how much everybody earns (it's determined
by your tenure status) and nobody makes a fuss about it.

~~~
jasonkester
Turns out you answered your own question in the sentence after you asked it.

You don't ever want your pay tied to seniority. You want it based on the value
you can deliver. That way, you with your 10 years of experience and proven
ability to ship good products get to make twice as much as Senior Dev John
with 10 years experience maintaining the internal CRUD app.

~~~
nkrisc
And then you have a company that wants to keep salaries secret, so they don't
have to keep hiring a new person to maintain their internal CRUD app every
every 6 months.

~~~
waterlink
I’m pretty sure that there are enough people who would be content with such a
simple job of maintaining CRUD app. They get less salary, yes, but also
they’ll have much less stress, and can focus their energy on other things.

------
eloisius
[http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi)

------
loph
"Privacy-focused", but you need to log in with your Linkedin credentials --
what could go wrong?

Thanks, but no thanks.

~~~
waterlink
Hold on.

You don’t provide LinkedIn credentials in any way to me or to my website. You
use it to authorize with LinkedIn (similar way, you can authorize with
Facebook, Github, Google, Twitter, and other OAuth platforms).

The only thing that my website can read (and for very limited amount of time):

\- Your email address, \- First name and last name, \- Unique LinkedIn ID, \-
LinkedIn profile photo URL.

That is it. There is no write permission for anything. This authentication
token doesn’t allow anyone to log in into your LinkedIn account.

This type of technology is called an Authentication Provider, and is used to
authenticate you on my website (not on LinkedIn).

Here you can read exactly how I process the data mentioned above:
[https://www.fellowage.io/privacy#linkedin-profile-
data](https://www.fellowage.io/privacy#linkedin-profile-data)

~~~
codegeek
"Keep your data anonymous"

Even though I personally understand why you are going with Linkedin, you
cannot claim that data is anonymous if you require Linkedin account to
authenticate. Privacy has nothing to do the with the technical implementation.
You are just explaining oAuth but the point is that you already who I am since
you require Linkedin. So it is not anonymous. Not for YOU at least.

~~~
waterlink
It’s not anonymous in a sense that I’m going to see your linkedin profile. I
could have found your profile on my own if I wanted to (that’s what LinkedIn
is for in the first place).

What’s important is that I’m not going to see the numbers you entered.

Also, since I’m verifying every registration (in half-automated/half-manual
way), and it takes about 20 seconds to do the verification, I cannot possibly
remember who I’ve seen and what profiles do they have. (simply because I’m
human).

Additionally, what is important is for what purposes you allow me to process
your data. And the only purpose for this LinkedIn data is to verify your
company name, job title, and location. Once that is done, the data gets
removed or disassociated from your account, which means that it can no longer
be meaningfully processed (anonymized), and since I don’t have your permission
to do any other types of processing—I won’t.

EDIT: So what is anonymous are the salary numbers—and that is what I’m talking
about on the landing page.

------
dannyw
I appreciate the focus on security with your multi-layered password feature,
but I just clicked out of your tab because none of my passwords are 'secure'
enough for you.

No, I don't want to use a password manager.

~~~
withinboredom
I can't even sign up with a password manager. Says the password is great (even
has special chars) but then get an error saying it doesn't.

~~~
waterlink
There was a problem with some special characters (they were not included in
validation), and password manager would generate a password that is pretty
good, but doesn’t have special characters I’ve initially chosen.

Now, I’m including most special characters, so it should work.

PS: Also, the pre-flight validation now includes special character check too,
so you can see the validity real-time instead of after you submit. (This check
was not originally included on the client-side, only on the server).

------
bilekas
There are some real concerns over the security on this site.. Even in the
sandboxes heroku one.

IMO this is not production ready.

~~~
waterlink
Could you please write these concerns to my email alex [at] fellowage [dot]
io?

I’ve used best industry practices for such web apps, and I’m curious what do
you think these concerns are!

------
ojagodzinski
Doesn't work with Adblock enabled. Adblock by default block shitty cookie
popups and without clicking accept i can't log in (and there is no info about
mandatory cookie accepting thing).

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Works for me with ublock origin. FWIW, although I also detest cookie popups
(particularly this one, which looks wholly unnecessary), this one is less
shitty than most. The customisation page actually looks pretty useful.

~~~
waterlink
Thank you!

I also detest these popups and "usual" customization pages.

If you think I can improve it even more, please tell me! :)

------
therealchiko
I like this idea and hope it gains ground. A thing to think about is to work
with ranges, in terms of showing a person how much other people earn. I can
imagine the system exposing someone at the same level in a relatively small
department that they shared such kind of info on your website (if user A
simply says but user B earn so much) so any way to "obfuscate" the data would
protect everyone.

------
mizzao
I agree with other comments that Glassdoor sucks, but levels.fyi has done a
great job so far. Not sure what this does above and beyond that.

------
vpmpaul
The main issue I have with these sites is that they are relatively pointless.
The really only are able to cover low and mid level position salaries. Those
salaries are not generally very elastic anyway and you can get pretty close to
the the salary info from public stats anyway. This makes the site pretty much
useless for those jobs.

If you are the Director of AI/Machine learning (or CFO or whatever) at some
company there are probably only you or you and one other person that ever had
that job. By providing the salary you are outing yourself anyway and risking
some sort of action against you. Anyone looking to move into these good jobs
has no use for the site either.

This is the real problem glassdoor had/has and why it will eventually
disappear or become nothing but ads or headhunter style site.

------
ryanmercer
HR won't care at my employer. There is no negotating a salary, there is no
asking for a raise. There is a base amount that everyone gets, period, when
they hire in and then your annual merit increase (the years we get one) is
0-3% and rarely does anyone even get close to 3%.

All you have to do is ask someone how long they've been here, take the lowest
number of the salary range for their position then multiply that by 1.02 or
1.03% for each year they've been here and you've got a pretty good idea of
what they make.

Each step up the ladder is a set % too so even if someone gets a higher
position (when one rarely opens up, usually when someone quits) you still know
about what they are making.

And my parent company employs what, like half a million people... nearly all
of which have similar pay brackets.

------
stevev
One issue with static data is that it’ll rise and fall. Salaries today may be
different in the future. You would have to continually receive data to have
the latest up to date changes.

Many variables affects the data; age, location, experience, availability,
opportunity etc. therefore your data starts to look more like a range, rather
than just a number.

In the past, for the same role, company a will only pay this much, whereas
company b is willing to negotiate; this is changing.

The problem has already been partially solved. Two companies comes to mind;
one stands out by far imo.

------
inertiatic
I surely hope this (or anything similar) catches on, but it's seriously hard
to get something like this going.

All the best and thanks for making this.

Btw, demo redirects to a heroku app domain, is this intended?

~~~
waterlink
Yes, the demo doesn’t have a separate domain setup. Is there a particular
issue you see with this? Please tell me if so!

------
withinboredom
This is terrible for distributed companies where putting in my location is a
great way to find me.

Also, it doesn't seem to accept EUR as a currency.

~~~
waterlink
About distributed companies, do you think an option to enter "Distributed
Company" in the location is a good solution for this problem? Then, what
happens if company pays vastly differently depending on the country/city?

About currency: It works, when you type the currency, you need to select the
entry from the auto-complete. I’m thinking about making it select the currency
automatically if only one option matches.

------
mscasts
Nothing on this page is clickable for me, it seems like the "cookie banner" is
invisible and taking up the entire page.

~~~
waterlink
Are you using some type of adblocker that blocks cookie banners?

I have coded my own cookie banner and didn’t use any of the existing tools out
there. That’s why I’m surprised if something is blocking it, but there was
already another comment about the same as well.

This is to be honest, weird thing for adblocker to do—to block legitimate
cookie banner.

And yes, website is not going to work until the required cookie is accepted
(my backend rejects requests when they don’t specify that the necessary cookie
consent was given).

~~~
mscasts
Well, I use pi-hole and uBlock Origin. But uBlock doesn't block anything so it
must be the pi-hole for some reason?

Do you use some third party script or something?

~~~
waterlink
No third-party scripts are used except for Live-Chat. And even that one is
only loaded when you click on the Live-Chat button.

Maybe pi-hole doesn’t like "cookie-banner" class/id of the cookie banner
component?

EDIT: there are some default landen.co scripts (for landing page only), but
they are fairly standard and shouldn’t be invasive for some extensions to
block them…

------
mberning
I like the idea. From the demo I could not tell but what measures exist to
prevent actors from falsifying information?

------
dannydannydanny
Why do I need to connect with linked and log in again? Also why are the
password rules so absurd? Inb4 [dumb-password-rules]([https://github.com/dumb-
password-rules/dumb-password-rules](https://github.com/dumb-password-
rules/dumb-password-rules))

~~~
waterlink
LinkedIn is used only to verify your information (current job title, company
name and location).

Then the password requirements are strong because it is used for encryption of
your critical private data in the system. The same reason is why you need to
login with your account ID (email) and password.

------
dnate
I would strongly suggest to add the option of sharing the salary without
sharing the company name. Especially in the early adoption phase: People are
probably the first one of their company to share their salary. If their
position is somewhat unique, it will effectively not be anonymous.

------
PretzelFisch
There are companies that collect and sale employee information such as "the
work number" they provide verification of employment as well as salary. Has
anybody taken this kind of data set to answer these questions rather then
surveying for bias mis reported data?

------
phyzome
> Sign up with LinkedIn

I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago and never looked back. They're shady
as all hell.

------
Double_a_92
I think this should be more "local". I.e. usually I want to know my direct
coworkers salary, not necessarily some nation- or corporationwide statistic.

Maybe an app where you scan some QR code, that somebody randomly puts in your
break room or so...

~~~
waterlink
This idea is quite interesting.

What do you think should this QR code lead to?

Salary information of one particular person (that put the QR code in the
room)? Or salaries of group of people who work there?

~~~
Double_a_92
I thought it would "invite" you to a group of shared salaries, where you can
add your own, and see statistics about the others.

------
pnutjam
I'd love to see a place where people could post the cost of benefits that
their employers offer them. In my experience this can vary widely and make a
huge difference in the compensation package.

------
abraCadabstrax
Hi there. Your page asked to accept cookies twice on Firefox Dev edition.

~~~
waterlink
It’s probably because of different domains (main production web app, and demo
web app)?

------
ghjdyfl
The site is pretty broken. I tried "USD", "$", etc. and nothing works
"Currency Required!" error. and there is no dropdown like claimed on the other
comment.

------
emrhzc
the only way to achieve reliability would come from comparing the actual
salaries of a set of big enough companies with what their employees have
actually volunteered to share and more importantly which ones. Only then you
would be able to actually measure how all the human factors are affecting the
outcome and then perhaps generalize it to real world. so the issue needs a
scientific research, not another zuckerberg.

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HugoDias
Isn't this the same thing Glassdoor does?

~~~
corentin88
Maybe. So what? There are many Ubers, AirBnBs, Googles, etc. Diversity and
competition is very valuable for consumers. It keeps innovation moving
forward, so I really don’t see your point here.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
It is ironic, how on a post about a website that encourages competition at the
employer level for providing fair wages, people are complaining that they
don't need competition at the meta-level (salary-sharing websites level).

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davidcollantes
It shows as a series of images for me under macOS Safari. Nothing responds to
clicks, as in, nothing is clickable.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Have you dismissed the cookie dialog at the bottom of the page?

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thiey
In Sweden you can just call the tax office anonymously and ask how much John
Doe earned last year.

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kottalovag
I tried to contribute but CHF is not accepted, it claims xurrency should be
filled.

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jve
> Hi there . I use cookies to make this website work (i.e., signup and login).
> Only essential cookies are being used, without which the application won’t
> work. No ads, no tracking, no pixels, no 3rd-parties involved ...

Per GDRP, you are not required to consent if you only use essential cookies.

> Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse
> the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the
> site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you
> are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These
> cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not
> required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are
> necessary should be explained to the user.
> [https://gdpr.eu/cookies/](https://gdpr.eu/cookies/)

Nice that you explain (GDPR site recommends that), however preventing
interaction with site (and generating confisuion as we see in commenets) is
overkill IMO.

~~~
waterlink
Awesome, thank you. I’m going to take that into account.

On the other hand, I wanted to be super-transparent with my users.

Because, I still see a lot of websites out there having "necessary" cookies,
and website works without accepting the popup, and users unknowingly accept
"by default" a lot of third-party tracking cookies, which makes me sad :(

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allgreen
meta: people who want to know salaries of their peers and demand equality have
a bit a wrong view on companies.

Companies are anything but not about equality, playing fair or being nice to
employees. Paying your staff different salaries is crucial and key to run a
stable organization. Most won't get why different salaries on the same level
create a stable organization, it's complex and would need an
extensive/scientific article.

An organization's owner's goal is not to make the individual one happy but
rather keeping the entire org on a good track. This involves keeping salaries
inequal. Maybe some of you have an educated guess on why inequality creates
downright stability.

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flr03
Looks very much like glassdoor to me. Good work though.

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astura
There's far too many LARPers online for me to take any self reported salary
info seriously.

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bradgnar
levels.fyi is still legit

------
cookie_monsta
1) Jokes about child pornography are Not. Funny. Ever. Remove that if you wish
to be taken seriously.

2) Every day I read about another database with x million user accounts ending
up on the open web. What could possibly go wrong here?

~~~
Snetry
Any type of joke can be funny Please do not police what jokes I can enjoy

~~~
cookie_monsta
I'm not policing anything. If we've dumbed down to the point where opinions
have to be prefaced with the tautological "it's my opinion that..." that's
probably something that 90% of posters here should be informed of.

As to your personal freedom to make light of an industry that commercialises
the destruction of young lives, I have no interest in that discussion so I
refrain from commenting.

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AmazingTurtle
"This allows me to keep the quality of the data in FelloWage high."

never heard such bullshit before lmao

~~~
waterlink
Possibly I’m wrong somewhere here, but that is a “bullshit” I honestly believe
in.

------
cmdshiftf4
I struggle to understand the motivation behind publicly sharing one's own
salary, especially with one's own coworkers. It seems to be primarily a
movement of low achievers trying to cripple the progress of high achievers, or
falsely lay claim to the same rewards as them.

It seems to be a rather meak attempt at collective bargaining without the
resolve to collectively organize, and I don't see it working out well for
anyone involved.

~~~
gdy
'primarily a movement of low achievers trying to cripple the progress of high
achievers, or falsely lay claim to the same rewards as them.'

People have different negotiating skills and different level of information
about job market.

Knowing how much other people get paid for the same job can be an incentive to
renegotiate one's salary or change an employer. Removing part of information
asymmetry allows to sell your work for the money closer to its real market
price.

~~~
cmdshiftf4
There are too many variables involved to determine a real market price for
those in tech product engineering in any meaningful way.

~~~
gdy
And yet that doesn't change anything.

