LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

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300 pointssk24iam169 comments

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.

"Contact info storage service for ex-colleagues I wasn't chummy enough to add on a real social network" pretty much sums it up for me.

I think there's a big gap between current and former colleagues I want to keep professional contact with, and folks I want to show photos of my kids.

Interesting, I am a recruiter turned software engineer and have the exact opposite feeling. When I was a recruiter it was a fantastic way to find niche candidates and just maintain a casual discussion with my best candidates in general, as well as publish relevant news to my connections.

As I was undergoing the transformation to engineer, it was a fantastic platform for me to reach out to people in my new industry and city, people who had gone down my path before, mentors, and etc. Then when it was time for job search, LinkedIn and Angel.co had the highest quality postings. Also, on LinkedIn when looking at a job posting I could see if someone from my bootcamp or university worked there, as a link right under the job posting.

My 2 cents... It's an underutilized resource. They have career data for the highest value people in the world. Yet their technology and interface are woefully dated. The mobile search is awful, and it should be a tool that everyone uses before every meeting. The "You may know X" ability to find new contacts goes down dramatically. It would be beaten by a heuristic that just checks people who work at your current or prior company in the same city.

I do think there's room for a turnaround.

The thing that most turns me off from LinkedIn is that it leaks your browsing information to the users you are browsing, through their "who viewed my profile" feature. If I want to just brush up on a contact's background before a meeting without announcing to him that I'm stalking him, I need to log out and re-browse. Major pain in the butt.

You can turn that off.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141009022529-27827108-how-t...

That they create a blog post for that rather than easily discovered UI elements (hover?!), says a lot about LinkedIn as a company.

Wow, never realized that! This is something that you should have to opt-in to, not opt-out.

It's pretty easy to discover--under privacy in your profile. But, yes, the fact that a number of these types of settings are opt-out rather than opt-in is a pretty dark pattern.

>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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

Has their "resume" representation even changed in 5 years? I doubt they're seeing it as a problem to be tackled. Everything I know about the company says that the left hand doesn't care what the right hand is doing, and they have a lot of hands.

I don't have a LinkedIn account, and I would probably reopen one if I heard that they stopped their incessant spam emails. I'm surprised that they haven't been sued to MySpace and back for those email policies, which almost certainly are illegal in the United States. (This based on my experience, which ended 2 or 3 years ago when, after months of failed attempts, I managed to close my account.)

Can't you just disable it? I got emails only when someone is sending me a message or invites me.

iirc when you sign up, they sua sponte take all your contacts from [fb, Google, your phone, etc] and message all of them saying you have invited them to join LinkedIn. This is the scummy behavior I assume the poster is talking about.

Not for years, they lost a lawsuit over that practice.

I signed up with a fake name and throwaway email the other day and I couldn't believe the process. There were about 8 steps for entering more and more personal information and one of them was definitely allowing linked in access to my email account.

Given all the data they have, it SHOULD be the job site to end all job sites.

It's good to me. I've changed jobs because of linkedin message before.

I also use it to keep track and keep in touch with previous coworkers.

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

Hence why I closed my account a year ago. As an engineer it provides me with nothing but recruiter spam.

Yet for me it's provided every single job I've ever had except my first straight out of University.

I closed mine when it was apparent recruiters were illiterate and couldn't read "Contracts only".

> I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.

One of my coworkers talked me into playing this game. We look for the most professionally pointless endorsements our contacts have and add to them. So maybe someone ends up 3 endorsements for Econometrics and 18 for Microsoft Powerpoint.

I have several PowerPoint endorsements :)

I figure the next step for LinkedIn is in union organizing. It seems pretty clear that is a possible next step for the software industry.

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...

I'd suggest you to read https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar..., the section about privacy.

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.

True, but that is not the issue. The clickwrap means nothing to me when they have this rider:

"7. Right to Terminate or Modify Software

    LinkedIn may modify the Software and this EULA with notice to you either in email or by publishing notice on the Website, including but not limited to charging fees for the Software, or changing the functionality or appearance of the Software. In the event LinkedIn modifies the Software or the EULA, you may terminate this EULA and cease use of the Software. LinkedIn may terminate your use of the Software, the EULA or the LinkedIn Service at any time, *with or without notice.*" (emphasis mine)[0]

Fundamentally, I cannot ever trust them.

[0]https://www.linkedin.com/legal/mobile/eula

Until 7 months later they quietly update the ToS.

7 months later they would still not have access to the submitted data that was never stored, only to future submissions.

that's a mighty big hoping that nothing in this regard will change. ever. in for-profit company. that eagerly steals all my contacts from my cell phone (to which I probably unknowingly agreed, but it's amoral).

NO.

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?

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.

When you submit data, your current state and history will form some basis for the entry into the salery database. When you update your information, you have a different state and history, and thus will generate a new entry.

Both should be in the data.

  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.

How is this possible? If the salary data is not associated to the user in any way can't a user submit their salary over and over again drastically swaying the aggregate salaries?

Presumably they're tracking when the user last submitted a salary, but not what they submitted.

I have. I'm aware I have a strong bias against LinkedIn when it comes to their data-handling. The entire company is built around selling me to recruiters, so I'm very wary about their collection of my employment information.

Edit. For example, I'm not sure if this current policy will continue into the future. It's easy for me to get used to handing them my salary information and for them to change the privacy policy under me.

The entire company is built around selling me to recruiters

I think you may have fixed this data accuracy debate/issue. If they ask recruiters only they may get nearly-accurate data.

Yeah, because I trust LinkedIn with privacy.

LinkedIn waited several years without letting me know that my account information had been hacked. For me at least they lost all credibility so reading their "privacy policy" would be a waste of time.

Sure, because the right combination of words somehow overrides LinkedIn's history of violating users' trust, of security breaches, and of sleazy practices.

That's why you should lie even to forms when asked for your salary.

Let's just all put down random number between $220,000 - $275,000 as base.

What if the UI is made for "normal" people and the highest option is "$150,000k+" /s

for devs it would actually get our salaries up to the right level, the big tech companies held down wages for 4-5 years.

This reminds me of a funny conversation I had once with a recruiter. He essentially demanded I provide him a salary number to give to a prospective company, as I had been flatly refusing to on the basis that it puts me at a disadvantage.

Eventually I threw out the highest amount I'd ever earned, about $225k a year total comp (partly tongue-in-cheek, partly to make a point), and he got really angry with me, telling me I was wasting his time and that nobody got paid that much. Needless to say, I ended any dealings with him at that point forward.

I've capped out my income at the moment, when recruiters talk to me I always try to force them into the compensation discussion first. Including risk discounts, expected future growth rates, etc. they quickly stop wasting my time.

Serious all developers should actually do that. I would say go beyond the $500k ceiling as well. It is us to blame for the low salary we have accepted from employers and then blame it to the companies.

+no responsibility +unlimited holidays +no office politics

What do you mean you don't trust them? The need the salary information only to sell to recruiters and companies. Any other value proposition they might come up with is purely bogus.

They'll find another way. It's Linked In. They regularly purchase and merge data from various sources. They'll phone your employer if need be.

"Hey employers, tell us how much your employees earn, so we tell you where you could save!"

This. If they give this salary to recruiters or do anything to hint at what a candidate's range might be, they will lose whatever trust they might still have.

In fact, I'd love to know what they can offer in the way of assurances against this.

But that's the whole point and you can turn it to your advantage. Report the salary you want, possibly higher than the one you have and all the recruiters and potential employers will know not to contact you if they cannot pay that much.

I read an article from Lifehacker about being transparent of your salary. Check out what are the benefits.

http://lifehacker.com/this-video-explains-why-you-should-tal...

Adam Ruins Everything - Why You Should Tell Coworkers Your Salary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xH7eGFuSYI

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.

you are making a lot of assumptions, read up on accuracy here https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar...

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.

Agreed. I've seen Senior be anywhere from Level 2 to Level 5 Software Engineer, depending on how the company assigns the wording.

It lets you filter by ranges of years of experience. I was way below the median when putting in just my title, but within a few thousand when also choosing the right years of experience range.

Totally agree. I'm the opposite -- been doing this for 25+ years, have done quite a few things in those years, but my current title is just "Developer." It doesn't mean much.

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?

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

Well in this specific case LinkedIn makes it so you have to report your salary to see other salary data, so that right there is one place where people have an incentive to add junk just to get the data.

But the more important problem is the selection bias.

Outside of lying, I've not seen an implementation of this that fully accounts for compensation outside of base salary (bonus, options, 401k matching, benefits, etc). I suspect some are entering only base, some base+bonus, or similar.

LinkedIn Salary appears to be reporting base salaries and total compensation.

Not necessarily lie. People, that earn less, are likely to be ashamed (even anonymously) of their salary, while big earners are prone to boast on every occasion.

Empirically, we see the opposite happening and compensation data on websites like Glassdoor is actually too low.

to be fair, glassdoor still averages in salaries from 5 years ago into the current salary

That's part of it. People with higher salaries don't contribute for privacy reasons. They're also missing bonus/equity data for many firms.

How do you know that the data on Glassdoor is too low? What is your source of truth? Anecdote? Glassdoor currently reports the average base salary for the job title "Senior Software Engineer" in SF Bay Area to be ~$130K which sounds about right to me, again, with nothing but anecdotal truth reference.

If you go by what people say on HN, then of course everyone in software makes $300K a year and has millions in stock options (and gets 5 job offers in their inbox a week).

I know how much I am paid, how much some of my coworkers are paid, how much my company pays new grads, and what the average salary on Glassdoor is for my company. The average is lower than what new grads got in 2016.

On top of the incorrect base salary, the information on bonuses/equity is extremely limited. The average that is listed is also incorrect.

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.

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.

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

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)

one of the engineers from Salary team. we talk about privacy and accuracy at length in this blog post https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar.... TL;DR; we do outlier detection.

What's an outlier? I bet a lot of people feel they're shortchanged by about $10k, and will report that much higher to set a baseline. Outlier sounds more like "AngularJS developer making $250,000 in Cleveland"

it means more accurate baseline calculation as well as median salary which will rule out things like "AngularJS developer making $250,000 in Cleveland"

This is the first salary listing I've seen that actually looks somewhat accurate (at least for some titles) I am confused why you guys aren't using the title standardization. You're surfacing and getting different results for "Senior Software Development Engineer" and "Senior Software Engineer" (whatever those mean). You should talk to someone in SNA about this. I think Qi is the guy now.

Also you're having sampling bias that's effecting levels. There's no way the median salary for a staff engineer is higher than a senior staff's. Again talk to Qi.

Stay cool.

Why didn't you buy industry standard employer wage reported surveys like any employer of size does? They are readily available and the cost would be a drop in a bucket for LNKD.

Because they'd rather make and sell their own, obviously

Well, if everybody else thinks that programmers make $200K/year, there's a chance that somebody might consider paying $200K/year. That seems like an incentive to me.

Nope. Lots of places can't pay that money. They'll still try to interview and hire people but they can't compete.

There is a very wide range of salary, skill and experience in tech. A single figure is not of much use. If anything it might be ruined by the vast majority of cheap companies (i.e. outside of Google/Apple/Facebook/... )

Maybe, but you would need massive collusion with millions of developers that you have never met in order to pull this stunt.

I don't think that sounds very plausible.

Well, we have you and we have me - who else is on board?

Hate to say it, but you only have you so far.

Assuming you wanted to work for LinkedIn and Microsoft I'd definitely encourage you to lie about your current salary just in case they were so inclined to look it up and leverage it against you.

IT Jobs Watch surveys recruiters for permanent roles data and contractors quotes for rates.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/

I have used this site. It seems fairly accurate - does everyone else find this too?

The Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland sends compulsory salary surveys to the enterprises itself. The collected data is then published in the Salarium [1]. It is based on more than 750'000 salaries from the private sector and runs since 1994. You can read more about the methodology in the PDF [2]

I worked as a Software Developer for a company that used the data as base for their salary negotiations and it worked quite well.

[1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...

[2] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfsstatic/dam/assets/6937/master

Interesting video about somewhat public tax returns, and hence salary, in Norway and other Nordic countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bO8zEaSuWg

There was no "hence salary" part. The salary back-estimation was very rough, e.g. for my income the estimation by a popular calculator was off by 25%. Using past tense here because anonymous access to tax data is discontinued.

You could tell if someone was poor or rich based on that, but for comparing incomes in your cohort it was not very useful.

For tech work, you can use H1B salary data (from somewhere like http://h1bdata.info/) as a minimum level for a position. Scale up by some percentage (10-20% in my experience) to get the median for what US citizens are likely making in the same position.

The problem is that this only includes base salary.

Yes, you're right. But base salary is the only reliable number to use for comparisons. If we get into things like startup stock options, value is effectively zero on a probability scale. Monetary bonuses are paid out based on all kinds of factors that may or may not come to pass, and have their own taxes associated with them. The only reliable extra comp I can think of would be RSUs and similar at large tech companies, but those are already fairly well known.

In my industry bonuses are as reliable as public company RSUs. To my knowledge, there is less public information on RSU grants and bonuses so I am puzzled by your last sentence.

Where have you looked? For example, a quick search on Quora will tell you the range of RSUs handed out to employees at Google at various levels.

I don't know how widely it's used, but it seems like LinkedIn could some how use Work Number [1] to allow people to verify their salary.

[1] https://www.theworknumber.com/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even if users were willing, this would be woefully inaccurate information. Mint shows take-home pay. But you have to keep in mind ...

  * People contribute between 0 to X% to a 401k. 
    This couldn't be deduced from take-home.
  * Many companies have a Employee Stock Purchase Program, 
    which is deducted from payroll.
  * Some (Many?) programmers get a large chunk of 
    compensation in options or RSUs.

I think self-reported is likely the only way to get numbers without some extremely invasive requests.

This would cause weird effects, like my canceling my 401k contribution if I want to change jobs to boost my apparent income.

Why not just go to ADP?

In practice, I think the problem is that everyone is fundamentally a market of 1. I have never seen a salary site (including Glassdoor, LinkedIn, or step) come even remotely close to what I actually make.

Years of experience, education, and title are never enough to gauge performance or pay.

Clearly location and fairly granular skill profiles would help. Other factors that might help include the type and size of the company.

Can you think of other factors that would help?

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...

What didn't you like about it? Can you give a small comparison?

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.

Interesting that the SDE2 at twitter is shown as lower than SDE1

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?

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

> 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.

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 or www.glassdoor.com...

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.

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

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...

> 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.

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

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

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

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)

we are going to be rolling out search by city soon

Yeah. Very few regions available internationally. Couldn't find a single city in China, France, Turkey, Israel etc.

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.

They can't even find info on SREs for the Greater LA area yet.

I'm not sure why that is surprising. Its a new product/service, I suspect over time the data will expand/mature.

I built a (free) chrome extension that will estimate salaries of LinkedIn profiles you view (along with other data) 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.

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

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.

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

Jobs? I get a lot of jobs offers via linkedin.

Networking. It's a rolodex.

I use it to chuckle over emails suggesting I endorse people I don't know for skills I'm not certain they have. I also enjoy when people who don't know me endorse me for skills they can't possibly know I have, and may not even possess. It's a cute game.

I've never actually found a job through LinkedIn, but I appreciate that it COULD be a good way to do so. It's got the potential. I think it just needs a few product changes and a whole lot more credibility with respect to customer privacy, and it could be a really great platform.

Unlike most of HN, I actually appreciate recruiters reaching out and I try to get back to each of them, if only to just understand what's out there, what possibilities I may be overlooking.

I use it as a way to get free interview practice. Any recruiter contact I am interested in I will reach out to and entertain the interview process for. Whether I am looking for not I have no problem getting free practice and if I find a team/company I like I might just change jobs.

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

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.

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".

I would assume that there is otherwise generally information asymmetry in the labour market, in the sense that employers usually have more knowledge of salaries than employees. Making good information openly available to both parties should benefit the party with less information more: the employee.

At the same time, if they are paying less than the average, won't that prompt them to at least move up to that?

Probably not, no incentive. Some hiring managers will put the pressure on the prospect to ask for more. If you can hire a quality employee for a little less than average, your bottom line comes out better.

I'm not the biggest fan of Linkedin, but this strikes me as quite cynical. I've been recruiting internally for a number of good startups and I've used salary transparency to advocate for better offers for prospective candidates. There will be a few bad actors as there already exist, but I do think this is a step in the right direction towards at least giving prospective employees a better understanding of their own worth.

Could be beneficial on both sides. Image a woman getting an offer, she can see the average pay and compare hers to that, so she can request equal pay.

I find most companies are generally in the know on how well they're paying their employees (employee retention, counter-offers, etc), it's the employees that lack this information.

One counterpoint. We (hiring managers and team leads) complained up the chain for a while that we couldn't hire or retain skilled developers. The state Dept. of Personnel did an industry salary survey, using tools like this, and concluded that developers working for our state were significantly underpaid and recommended a salary increase, which apparently is now being debated by Governor and Office of Financial Management.

So these kinds of reports are useful for supporting our answers to questions like "Why do you say none of the applicants for this developer position are qualified" when we answer "because you'll only offer $50k/year".

Now as for whether that will actually play out and result in salary increases remains to be seen.

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.

Most people don't work at large companies though.

I'd say the exact opposite. No company pays above market average by accident.

Yeah, sometimes companies understand that paying above market rate increases retention and this has pays all kinds of dividends for the company.

But they have to be fairly on the ball, and many people just aren't.

> 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.

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

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

And as always, doesn't work in Europe.

Works in england.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Everyone knows that nothing outside the USA really exists

well, comparab.ly better step up fast.

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

How come?

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.

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