This is just going to be a collection of anecdotes from people who self-select to report because they feel good about where they're at, or because they feel righteously justified in complaining about their situation. Self-selection ruins the data. The responses have to be random to be useful. And the silly thing is that most people who are involved in this business know this.
It's anonymous. I'm not sure why you think it'd be so susceptible to bragging or complaining. A lot of people, me included, are data nerds, and will contribute to the dataset regardless of our personal situation simply because we want the data to be as accurate as possible.
But apart from that, if a site has no privacy policy, you should have no expectation of privacy or anonimity. If they added an advertising tracking tag they could easily match the data you provide to your real name, your hobbies, your online shopping habits, your marital status...
Because people are irrational by their nature, and it takes a lot of effort to eliminate such factors when you make a decision.
First, even in your version, the "feel goods" (high salaries) and the "complainers" (low salaries) would cancel each other out, and (assuming equal numbers of them) will give us a usable median value.
But in the real world is more complicated than "self-selection" in the basic mode you describe.
Who might "feel good" and who might feel "justified in complaining" will not be so much based on the salary, but more on the person and their personality (which we can assume are evenly distributed among salaries).
In other words, it won't only be actually great salaries that are reported from people "feeling good", nor only low salaries reported from people "justified in complaining". And then you'll also have people that regardless if they consider their salary high or low, they want transparency etc, and report their salaries.
The end median result, given enough samples, would be a useful, if not 100% accurate, representation of the situation.
Why would you assume that? To me it seems the opposite, that they wouldn't be evenly distributed.
In areas like SFBA where the job market is liquid, people will be less likely to be stuck in a job where offer basics like salary don't match their expectations -- so they'll be more likely to weight other factors like culture and mission when considering how happy they are at their current job. In less fluid markets, people can more easily find themselves in a position where they're disappointed with salary but unable to find a better opportunity.
In those situations, you might be more likely to find people who are either satisfied or dissatisfied with culture, mission, growth etc but are also disappointed with salary.
Why would they cancel each other out? Why would there be equal numbers?
Exactly. This is the issue that people who say "doesn't Glassdoor already do this?" minimize, and miss the point of why public salaries would be amazing in terms of improving labor markets.
I think for anyone who is big into "free markets", there is an unresolved tension between "it's better if we let things continue as they are" and "a market always operates better when it has more information". I don't understand why so many staunch advocates for free markets easily opt for the former.
It's pretty obvious to me: this information asymmetry between employers and employees benefits employers, letting them lowball some hires. More information would make hiring more fair, but also hurt the bottom line, so they don't want it.
There might be some exceptions around high profile positions (i.e. CEO) if there's an expectation that media attention and other factors might turn that loss into a profitable long-term investment, but it certainly isn't going to apply to your run-of-the-mill blue collar, middle manager or software developer position.
Thanks for putting that data together. It certainly was eye opening, and as a bit of a numbers junkie myself I appreciate having the raw data presented instead of just summary information. (well, sort of raw. much more raw than others I've found and not spammy at all)
I understand wanting some more input and encouraging users to provide it, but they take it too far.
The way you have it set up with a pretty easy way to search the data along with some posts that highlight some interesting aspects of the data appeals to me a good deal more. I should have known by the site name, but I didn't know there was an actual job board at jobsintech.com until the 3rd or 4th time I visited.
I'm actually in the process of moving the data to the main website (http://www.jobsintech.io/visas), so I'm trying to not mess it up.