Show HN: See if you're being paid fairly with TransparentCareer

This is exactly the reason we started the site. We figured that being able to filter by educational background helps both create better apples to apples comparisons and also allows for career exploration based on your background in addition to just showing compensation. Thanks for checking it out and glad you enjoyed it!

Hi! I like the concept and am interested in poking around at your data.

During the signup flow, I'm glad to see that the "gender" page is polite enough to offer a "prefer not to answer" option. It'd be nice if the "education" form which follows did the same. A "no degree" option might also be worthwhile. As it's currently implemented, the site appears to believe that every career begins at college graduation; that may be the most common path, but it's certainly not the only one.

[edit: after further exploration, this "education" form turns out to be so strict it's kind of funny. I can't get past it by filling in bogus data, since it seems to be trying to validate everything, but whatever lookups it's doing aren't returning any data, likely because it's never heard of the school I went to. It won't accept blank fields, but neither will it let me put anything into them, so I don't think I can try out your site after all.]

A little "inside baseball" here.

In a previous life, I was the technical cofounder of a company that did this exact thing (founded 17 years ago and still going!) I no longer work there but am good friends with a lot of people who have been in this space for a while.

I've seen scores of companies put up salary data over the years, and talk about transparency. This is because the barrier to entry is low (you only need a few thousand data points to create a lot of SEO pages) Any job board or startup can bang out a website or app in a few weeks that collects data and republishes it on a variety of pages.

Part of the reason things are not transparent is because people and companies don't always like transparency, often for good reasons. They are worried about their jobs, about disrupting their work environments, about legal consequences.

I think there's still room to move in this space but it's important to really differentiate yourself and focus on accuracy. Perhaps a difficult or niche area and do really well there? The mistake people make is thinking you can have a data model that looks like Job/Salary/Location/Industry/Skills and you are good. That data works for a few industries but falls apart pretty quickly. Pay structures for many jobs are pretty complex.

Is there something new and innovative that you are really doing? Will people really even care even if you do? These are important questions to ask yourself. If you are just trying to backdoor a recruiting pipeline, you should be honest with candidates. Otherwise, they will just put you in the spam bin. Trust is super important and hard to win.

Companies have been collecting anonymous salary data online since the web was a bunch of CGI and perl scripts. You tend to get a lot of clumpy data from a few industries and not in others. You can get data from those other places, but it's not easy and buying keywords won't get you there.

Compensation is hard and complicated and different per industry, country, region. People are SUPER sensitive to it being wrong, and also have tons of predisposed ideas about pay that often conflict with the data.

PS - I also went to U of C many years ago! Best of luck!

When describing a job, on the "satisfaction" page, I'm not sure how to interpret the "impact of work" rating. Is it talking about the job's impact on my life, or does it refer to a sense that doing the work accomplished something meaningful? Are larger numbers better (as with the satisfaction and recommendation sliders) or are smaller numbers better (as with the weekly hours and travel % sliders)?