Slowly working it up now, actually.

An annually updated, unbiased, multiple source application that engineers can use to check salary offers vs their skills, to make sure they don't get shortchanged. Intended to work for the entire planet (that we have data for).

I love this idea

God's work. Would fund your coffee.

@3rdWorldPoison OP is the closest we have to a god, so obviously

I'm curious how you define skills. I would probably use some DL model to learn an embedding of skills which then feeds a frontend network to generate a salary estimate. That is, if you don't ask people to just enter that data in a standardised format, in which case I'm curious how you convert your existing database to said standardised format.

@RememberMe
Initial goal is make it cheap/free to host, run on anything, so there will be lots of precomputed compressed subsets that can be conventionally cross referenced for each sample set vs a coherent metric. Rule of thumb is deliver as little data as possible. Most results will be against a single set. Eventually would want to become our own data source, but that requires trust and visibility.

The interesting thing about the problem domain is that there are three possible sources of data with three different reporting rationales:

- self-reported (stack overflow, bias and noise for ego reasons)
- employer-voluntary reported (forbes, us news, BLS, same agency function in the EU. Similar bias, but to employers benefit)
- wage report (least granular, title or industry based, lots of noise im the classifier)

No source of data is 100% accurate, or 100% veracity, so the initial product will provide median, p1, p10, p90 for primary tech specified for employee and employer location and present the higher of the two as the recommendation, along with links to rationale of why (effect of competitive pricing, why you shouldn't work for the lower of the two, the impact that has on your local market and the remote market, etc).

The ultimate goal is to make people not only more aware of what they should be paid, but also educate people about how labour works, and how to spot a good offer from bad one, and how to spot predatory labour arbitrage, et al.

So a few different competitors exist (few I've personally used)

www.payscale.com
www.paycheck.in (India only)
www.dice.com
www.glassdoor.com (very bad imo / very famous and thus highly biased)

None of them tackle the valuation of "skills" yet. Partly because it's too hard to objectively measure and second because companies still don't valuate based on skills (unless heavily specialized).

@SortOfTested I see. And you're different from existing services like Glassdoor because it only takes one of the data sources you mentioned into account?

@RememberMe @3rdWorldPoison
That's one difference, yes. They only use their own data, period. They don't really bother with external data.

The goal over time would be larger, more diverse datasets to get a better and better picture of what is, and eventual trends on a national and global level.

The biggest difference is it's free, as in speech and beer. It will be open source. Its not freemium, or pay for features. It's what I view is a necessary fuck you to people trying to suppress wages across the market. An educated workforce is a workforce capable of representing its own interest. We have to reach a point where companies have no choice but to compete for labor on a global scale to solve critical problems we face as a planet.

Ultimately, I want it to get away from me, I want contributors. I want it to go beyond my skills alone. If that happens it's that much better.

@3rdWorldPoison How does something being popular equates it to being highly biased? Where's the causal links in that?

Also, there is sites that evaluate salaries based on skills, Adzuna's ValueMyCV and TopCV being two of the ones I've used.

@3rdWorldPoison damn.. That's a great way to spoil my mood for the rest of the day :/

Shit.

Now I need to talk to my manager.

@Berkmann18
Those sites are job posting aggregators and are biases to what companies want to pay vs their job listings. It also doesn't have any metric of accounting for which jobs are filled, unfilled over time, reposted, etc.

There's always a bias on this sort of thing: employer or employee. You want to avoid any source that only assesses what employers say they want to pay.

@Berkmann18 My bad. I thought people would make the connection.

The HR / TLM goes to far lengths to bring down their average salaries to the minimum.

This may include selecting specific people to provide salary details to average the salaries or straight up defining policies to avoid reviews from highly paid employees.

Since other platforms are not that famous, employers don't really give a shit on what it says about their company.

Will there be a way to get reports filtered by data source? One source may be biased. So being able to see the independent source values separately would have value. Also, would be useful to see salaries vs experience/degrees. So someone can predict salary changes as they progress or get higher degrees.

OMG WE SO NEED THIS! I’m tired of being rejected due to my older tech stack! My potential is being wasted and it’s driving me crazy. I’m tired of being judged by recruiters who don’t know SHIT about development! I doubt they wrote any code in their damn lives yet they’re the ones who preach what I should know! The newer tech stacks are for the most part actually EASIER than the older ones bc of all the shit they encapsulate so all you have to do is import a module, library etc and call a function. I’m FRUSTRATED AS FUCK that there are IMBECILES who get paid so well and don’t know SHIT! Can’t code SHIT! Can’t do SHIT! What makes them SPECIAL???

@Demolishun
As mentioned before, the purpose the is to display results from multiple sources, not just 1 and explain each source.

I will actually pay money for this (so I can 1. Get an idea of how much I would be paid in the future, 2. Actually see if I get ripped off when I get a job)

We have something similar in Ukraine. It's djinni.co. It also has an email subscription that sends you the salaries for selected skills and level monthly.

It also mentions which income bracket is the most common and what was the record highest salary in this month's offers.

It's anonymous for the devs, your employer can't find you on the site. It's also used to find a job or hire people. I think, devs wherever you live would appreciate something like that.

@SortOfTested - did this ever take off?